She really has no outlet for the emotions she’s feeling, not in her ordinary life. Dorothy is very isolated, she’s a homemaker and she’s lost two children, and her husband has turned very cold. So the book definitely opens the door to the possibility that Larry is not real, but a fantasy Dorothy has generated. She asks herself if she might be going crazy. One thing I love about this scene is that when we first meet Dorothy, we know that she keeps hearing radio ads that are directed at her personally. For obvious reasons, this scene with Mrs. There’s also a lot of writing around sex that ultimately as a reader is just kind of forgettable - that is, much like in life, neither the best or the worst. I was like, “Okay we could talk about James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, or any number of Michael Ondaatje novels, or Mary Gaitskill.” But maybe there’s something about just really committing to that first, sudden, alarming impulse. I was somewhat alarmed - and then my alarm turned to curiosity - that this was the first book I thought of. She asked, “Where do you come from? Does everyone make love so many times in one day?” Most of their talk consisted of asking and answering questions. They made love on the living room floor and on the dining-room sofa and sitting in the kitchen chairs, and upstairs in the bathtub. What the hell could it mean in such an encounter?

They rolled backwards together on the bed. But it’s very strange.”Ī lot more than strange, she thought. “A woman,” she whispered, her throat beginning to close up. He said, looking at her, “I’ve never seen. He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her down gently on the bed. He picked up the skirt from around her knees and lifted it over her head. He stepped forward, took off her bathrobe, letting it fall on top of the bed, and started to take off her nightgown from top to bottom, but quickly realized that it must be made to work the other way. Caliban, about a woman who meets a hot amphibian. For our inaugural “The Best Sex I Ever Read” column, Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel, selects Rachel Ingalls’s 1982 book Mrs.

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