Book review: Unlocking the door to repressed sexuality to find a true happy ending

In 'Love Me!' Marianne Power is more interesting when she is searching rather than after finding her happy ending

Marianne Power has chronicled her search for sexual freedom and understanding. Picture: Mat Smith Photography

• Love Me!: One woman’s search for a different happy ever after 
• Marianne Power 
• Picador, €14.99 

If you’ve always wanted to find out more about tantric sex but don’t know where to start, this is the book for you. Ignore the icky title. 

Marianne Power’s previous book, 'Help Me!' was about the year she spent following the advice of a new self-help book every month and was a huge international success.

Marianne is turning 40 and has been single most of her life. In a society that sets the standard for successful living as marriage and kids, or at least “coupledom”, she wonders why she has missed out. 

In her 20s, she thought she was just not the sort of girl men liked. In her 30s she found that men did like her, but she was always relieved when the affair ended after a few months. 

She concludes that she is damaged, insecure, and afraid of commitment and intimacy.

But maybe she simply didn’t want children, nor even “coupledom”? Surely there was a way to be single, and also have an interesting life with amazingly good sex? 

This book is an honest, brave and often moving account of her active pursuit of such a lifestyle.

Marianne Power is a London-based journalist with Irish parents — “mum from Kerry and Dad from Clonmel” — and convent-educated: “I was a 40-year-old Catholic schoolgirl, and not the fun, naughty kind, the ‘everything is a sin’ kind.”

She has a circle of helpful friends including young Daisy who identifies Marianne’s problem as repressed sexuality. She recommends Pussy: A Reclamation by Regena Thomashauser. 

It begins by asserting that pussy is ‘arguably the most powerful pejorative word in the English language.

It makes Marianne wince, though she agrees with the theory that being unable to find a satisfactory word for “that which is most essentially feminine about us” is partly why women are plagued by self-doubt and self-loathing.

“ Pussy unsettled me,” Power admits.

So it was a brave move to accept a magazine’s invitation to attend a residential tantric workshop and write about it.

She discovers that she is not the only one feeling ambivalent about the prospect, and eventually finds friends among the wearers of sarongs and blindfolds. 

It seems tantric sex is more about recognising your limits and taking it slowly than anything wild and exotic.

She is more excited by The Ethical Slut. Its authors define a ‘slut’ as “a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical position that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you”. 

Marianne’s candid, confessional account of “thawing out” and losing the habit of putting herself down in order to please other people is consistently entertaining.

Daisy helps by taking her to a festival of alternative practices where she camps in a rainy field: “I went to the changing dome, took off all my clothes and walked my naked, non-yoga body into the open air, doing my best to pretend that this was totally normal for me.”

She attends another tantric workshop and finds the perfect lover only for him to step back a few weeks later “to focus on his spiritual path”.

Her experiences contrast with her friends’ experiences of loneliness, marriage, and motherhood. 

Her mum is the voice of common sense from a generation that did not have all the options of Marianne’s generation. When asked why she had children, mum replies: “Because I got pregnant!”

While she certainly loses her inhibitions, Marianne also has what sounds like a serious breakdown and is put on anti-depressants. 

Her quest lasts for five years, and her account, while lively, is seriously over long. She is more interesting when she is searching rather than after finding her happy ending.