Rating: 
Summary: This is not erotica!
Review: If you want to read erotica, don't buy this book. If you want to read pornography, don't buy this book. Catherine Millet isn't interested in turning anyone on. She's not even really interested in being turned on herself.
What Catherine Millet does is to write incredibly frankly about a life full of sexual experiences and she does so without regret, nostalgia, or any emotion whatsoever.
Whatever people's reactions are, it is a ground-breaking book. There aren't many taboos left in this world, but surely one of them is that sex is supposed to be about pleasure. What this book does is to reduce it to a matter of mechanics, and people's reactions to it reveal more about them than it does about the book.
Rating: 
Summary: A remarkable work of non-fiction
Review: Catherine Millet has provided us with a quite remarkable insight into a certain kind of female sexuality. With remarkable frankness, she leads the reader through an extraordinary range of experiences with a good deal of self-reflection, very little moralizing and a total lack of political correctness (hooray!). While there is an obvious inclination to focus on the extremes of her sexual behavior that go well beyond the normal range of experiences of most of us, in fact the majority of the book explores the nitty gritty of the kinds of activity that are much more mainstream. And perhaps we can be grateful that someone else has done the dirty work of accumulating the range of experiences necessary to make the insights authoritative!This is not a work of erotica, in my opinion. And if an open discussion of sexual activity between consenting adults makes you uneasy or worse, or offends your morals, don't read this book. But, if you think you might enjoy an unprecedented, direct and thoughtful consideration of the sexuality of a very interesting woman, this book comes highly recommended
Rating: 
Summary: boring, repetitive, badly written, translated poorly
Review: Do yourself a favor, skip this mess. It's boring, repetitive, badly written, and translated poorly. Often the ramblings are just incoherent. There are inexplicably long paragraphs that start with one subject, switch to something unrelated, and end with yet another story. If the eroticism is what interests you, skip this book: You will be disappointed. Amazon.com has a wide selection of much better erotica to select from or you can go to literotica.com to get stories from amateurs written a hundred times better than this mess.
Rating: 
Summary: Millett's sexual dystopia
Review: This wilfully picaresque sexual odyssey claims to narrate Millett's multitudinous carnal prostrations before numberless male predators in the (mostly)anonymous circumstances of what could euphemistically be termed swingers' parties but which might more properly be decoded as de facto gang-bangs. Preening herself without the slightest trace of self-consciousness as a 'spunk bag'(in Adriana Hunter's English translation) for her suitors, Millett dilates freely on being 'shafted' by one partner, fellating another whilst solacing two further suitors manually (her anus being spared on this occasion for future encounters). This mechanistic passing-in-review of sexual permutations has recently been greeted by British reviewers as an apolitical celebration of a descried 'new stage' in the supposed onward march of female sexual self-expression and assertiveness. I beg to differ--for the kaleidoscope of imagery advanced here (there is no 'plot' and all exists in the eternal present of the authoress's somewhat repetitive recalls of past time), connects little with common experience of female sexuality. What such sado-masochistic images DO very triumphantly achieve however amounts to a magnificently pungent satire on the habitual content of that almost exclusively male sub-genre: hard-core pornography. For this (male) reader the book comes together most coherently when read as an archly constructed spoof and (well-taken)critique of male pornofantasies. Read at face value on the naturalistic level the book is merely bemusing (I do not find the joys implicitly claimed for her numberless couplings or 'quadruplings' remotely credible-more verisimilitudinous is her account of a painfully paralysed arm after strenuous manual stimulation of one of her sexual beneficiaries).
I bought the book because its blurb (by Edmund White) suggested that it explored the somewhat fugitive entity of female sexuality with a rare candour. Alas, I remained unenlightened in that regard since Millett rather perversely removes the most important, emotional dimension of female experience from her meditations. Of Millett the person beyond her erogenous zones we get little inkling. On the positive side, though, I was able to find a 'reader-response' access by viewing the volume as a somewhat disconcerting mirror held up to male sexuality (in whose excesses the authoress colludes for reasons which intuitively appear to be 'masochistic' but which her strangely unrevealing memoir ultimately leaves opaque). It is good that Ms. Millett has emerged from activities which must count functionally as tantamount to those of a 'sex worker' so physically unscathed by male psychosexual volatilities and indeed with such an apparently benign attitude to men. Not all in her position(s) have been so lucky.
Rating:
Summary: Dull, Dull, Dull.
Review: As a preface, let me say that I bought the book and tried to read it. I'm not someone who goes around writing bad reviews about dirty books. That said, there isn't much to recommend in this book. On some level, it might be considered a feminist work in that it talks about a woman "breaking the mold" by having hundreds of sexual partners. It seems that the "breaking the mold" theme was done years ago in Fear of Flying. I'm not even going to start getting into the debate about whether unprotected sex with mulitple partners advances anyone's cause. The story fails as an erotic work; the letters sections of most men's magazines are more erotic. Much of the book is along the lines of, "I went to an orgy, laid in a recliner, and let everyone have a go. The next day, I went to an orgy, ...." Far too much of the book repeats the same old things in the same old way. There's no humor to it, and there doesn't seem to be much enjoyment. Occassionally there is some self-reflection, but it isn't especially well-written either. This is a depressing story (it would be equally depressing if a man was telling it, but I think more people would be jumping up and talking about the actor's reprehensible conduct). The hardback version seems over priced and overly long by about 75%.
Rating:
Summary: very hot and frank
Review: this is the hottest piece of erotica i have ever read. the lady definitely knows and acts on what she likes...
Rating:
Summary: Boring and un-erotic
Review: This book was talked up so much by so many people that I decided to pick it up.. much to my dismay. The writing is trite, the stories repetitive and not terribly interesting and the sexual encounters are completely overdone to the point of draining all of their eroticism. Reading and re-reading stories about orgies and illicit sex acts with no explanation, insight or (at least) craft of writing is just boring. Not worth your time. If you're looking for interesting erotica, try some Anais Nin.
Rating:
Summary: Since when is Sex intellectual?
Review: Or perhaps intellectual is too good a term for it. This unintelligable nonsense goes on for far too many pages. We have whole chapters in which the author tries to relate having sex al fresco to expanding person freedom into space. Is this the actual sense we're supposed to get from sex, or is the rest of the human race just not attuned to it like Miss M.? Not only does she describe scenes of unimaginable humiliation with a blink, but she even describes a scene in which she was beaten by a dozen different people while running down a street, and both times without the slightest hint of emotion.
Sex has not made this woman alive, it has made her dead! It has not made her free, it has made her a toy. She describes in a scene in which she trusts her male escort so much that she will sleep with anyone he gives the nod to. I wonder if Miss M. still comes out in public.
Rating: 
Summary: Strangely Detached, Perhaps.
Review: This book was a quick read but I'm not sure what I know now that I didn't before I read it. The title is sufficiently self-descriptive. I would think that I would be very interested in such a detailed look at that sex life of a beautiful woman with a lot of experience. But she seems strangely detached from much of her sex life and that leaves the reader somewhat detached also. I wonder if a woman's orgasm is just so difficult to write about or it just doesn't matter that much to them.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting But Repetitive
Review: It has been said of the books by Henry Miller and Anais Nin that they considered every trivial event that happened to them to be worthy of reporting. It seems to me that Catherine Millet holds the same idea when she wrote her sexual memoir. What struck me about this book is Ms. Millet's total absorption into her sexual life, as if just this part of her existence is what drives her. I had read about Ms. Millet's book before I purchased a copy. What influenced me was that this book was an honest record of a woman's sexuality. However, I would have to agree with other reviewers that after the first 50 pages I found the reading a bit boring.
What I got from this book is that Millet's sexual encounters are like a drug: she achieves momentary satisfaction but requires higher doses, and more outrageous acts. One of the more bizarre episodes was the interview she gave to a journalist friend where relates how much she enjoys the self-abasement of her sexual activities. At times, Ms. Millet thinks of herself as an unpaid prostitute and wonders why she does not take money from the men she services. It appeared to me that Ms. Millet found sex a compulsion and an outlet for her exhibitionist nature, a pleasure but one that does not satisfy.
The book is translated from the French and not having the original text I cannot judge the accuracy but the words flow well. Once you begin reading, the repetitive sexual encounters blur and cease to be shocking or revealing. There is no time line so you are not sure about what period in her life she is talking about. I would have preferred a book that was organized like a biography instead of the loose time association she adopts. Because I found that my interest in the book was not sustained I have given it 3 stars. I still can recommend it to the curious but with the caveat that it may not meet your expectations.
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