A PART OF THE HEART CAN'T BE EATEN

A popular sex educator and podcast host reflects on her life.

A year after Taormino, author of multiple books about love and sex, was born on Mother’s Day 1971, her hippie parents relocated the family from Long Island to New Hampshire to live in a ramshackle refurbished church. The author hadn’t yet turned 2 when her father, an Army veteran, permanently abandoned the family to move in with a male lover, who was a local priest. Taormino always believed her father married her mother to shield himself from a complicated desire for men. After returning to New York, the author experimented with self-pleasure and helped her feminist mother through the trials of single motherhood. These heartfelt, moving anecdotes set the candid tone for the remainder of the memoir. In the 1980s, Taormino became obsessed with “trendy and daring” shows like Solid Gold, riding horses, and female singers who defended their sexual autonomy. Her unapologetic sex-positive disposition manifested after she lost her virginity in college and developed affinities for women, sadomasochism, and the life of a femme “queer dyke.” In Provincetown, she reunited with her father and enjoyed bonding time at drag shows. Their unconventional father-daughter bond endured until her father fell desperately ill in the early 1990s from AIDS. After his death in 1995, Taormino, severely depressed, immersed herself in the sexual subcultures thriving in New York City, where she wrote for a lesbian porn magazine, launched a Village Voicesex column, and enjoyed a sexual affair with a gay male friend. The author’s outspoken sexual identity proceeded onward to encompass feminist pornography, guidebooks, and numerous awards. With personal images, sincere prose, and powerfully intimate excerpts from her father’s unpublished memoir, Taormino’s text very much orbits around her relationship with her father. The woman emerging from the grief has become a powerful, inspirational, unapologetic sex educator and creative dynamo.

A passionate memoir packed with emotional punch and enlightening glimpses of personal liberation.