365 Nights -- A Sexless Book about Doing It for a Year

Two memoirs were released this summer with sex as the unifying theme.

One was the straight-to-paperback 365 Nights by Charla Muller. In her epilogue, she asks that English majors go easy on her, so I'll try to be kind.

Muller's book promises to be a book about sex, but while she shows us the gun above the fireplace, she never takes it down off the mantle. The sex itself, which one would rationally assume would be the centerpiece of the book, occurs off stage. All we get are cliches like "doing the deed" and "the Gift."

This could have been a perfectly nice book about married life and intimacy, but the book is mis-titled and therefore misleading. As a reader, I'm not looking for any pornographic details, but I am looking for some specifics here. Muller never once mentions what happens in the bedroom, whether she orgasms, or anything like that. She does mention that her husband was once, around the 80th night, too tired to complete, but that's as graphic or as detailed as she ever gets.

Questions that readers never get answers to while reading this book: 1) does Muller like sex? 2) how many partners did Muller have before marriage? 3) is sex important to intimacy (I'm assuming the book's answer is "yes," but we're also told that daily sex became routine and more of a chore).

Interestingly, this book has an editor listed as a co-author (and not her husband, by the way), and that is a warning sign itself.

The other "sex" memoir is Just Do It by Douglas Brown. I'll post a review on it shortly.