The Sexual Life of Catherine M is finally to be published in Britain. This beautifully written little book, describing the sexual adventures of 53-year-old Catherine Millet, Parisienne intellectual, art critic and all-round aesthete, became a runaway bestseller in France last year. Her chapter titles give some sense of the gravity and sublime Frenchness of the memoir: (1) Numbers; (2) Space; (3) Confined Space; (4) Details. In France it was greeted with serious debate and academic treatises about feminism and sexuality.
And so we turn to our advance copy. Well... after only a cursory flick, we confidently predict that this book is going to do well here. In fact it will probably become required reading, if only of the one-handed-read genre (as they say).
The Sexual Life of Catherine M, as it turns out, is porn: 186 pages of it. There is no plot - only accounts of hundreds, if not thousands, of men slipping through Millet's life and giving her a good seeing to on their way by, sometimes dozens of them at a time. The woman cannot go for a walk up a hill on a hot summer's day without getting covered in semen. She cannot go to the dentist without having a sweaty threesome. There is nothing she likes better than to be shagged for hours at a time on some rough surface - a concrete park bench, say - and if there is anything she doesn't know about having sex in the office... well, we would like to hear it. This is a woman who understands what a bidet is for, and knows how to use it.
If she were British, we would be shouting: "Come off it!" How many British women would willingly combine sex and hillwalking? Or see nothing odd about a dentist whipping off her knickers? But Millet is so utterly matter-of-fact about her slagtastic exploits - peppering her glacial prose with gritty little asides about limiting herself to anal sex at an orgy because she had "a touch of the clap", or getting abrasions on her spine from a wooden table (the missionary position being much the best for swingers' parties) - that one feels obliged to take her word for it.
Farewell, then, to the last empress. It's hard for us young folks to give two figs, but if my gran had been alive, she'd have been genuinely upset. Gran did not find the lumpy hats or the outsize court shoes ludicrous. To her, the Queen Mum was everything a woman should be: a dutiful wife and steadfast mother, and always beautifully turned out, in such lovely colours. The Queen Mum never let the side down. "D'you know she has exactly the same waist size now as she did when she was married?" Gran told my sister and me as we diligently pasted cuttings into our Charles and Di wedding scrapbooks in the summer of 1981. "Really?" we asked, looking up at the roly-poly little figure on the telly. "Yes," said Gran. "Exactly the same!"
