The memoirist who wrote of lust in later life

In 1999, retired high school English teacher Jane Juska placed an unusual personal ad in the New York Review of Books. “Before I turn 67, next March, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like,” it read. “If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Juska’s ad resulted in 63 replies, one nude photograph, and dalliances with five men, documented in her best-selling 2003 memoir, A RoundHeeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. Juska’s book, which critics lauded as funny, frank, and sincere, both titillated and inspired readers with her taboo-busting account of senior sensuality. “I wanted to be the woman I was never able to be, a woman who delights in intimacy with a man, not fears it,” she wrote. “I wanted to get fat on the bounty of men.” Juska grew up in Archbold, a small, conservative town in northeastern Ohio, “where many of her neighbors were Mennonites,” said The Washington Post. She married young, but had little physical or emotional chemistry with her husband. “The loneliest I have ever been was when I was married,” she would later say. Juska “rarely dated” after her 1970 divorce, focusing on raising her son and teaching English, said The New York Times. She said she hadn’t had sex for some 30 years when she saw Autumn Tale—a 1998 film in which a married woman places an ad in a newspaper for a widowed friend who thinks she’s too old to find love. “Why not, Juska wondered, do something similar for herself?” A Round-Heeled Woman “was originally written as fiction,” said The Guardian (U.K.). But, encouraged by one of the men she met through the ad, Juska turned her adventures into a humorous memoir. She gave her lovers pseudonyms like Graham the Younger, a 30-something man she fell hard for. The book was a hit, leading to appearances with Oprah Winfrey and Charlie Rose and inspiring a stage play. She wrote a sequel, 2006’s Unaccompanied Women, and a novel, 2015’s Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say, an acclaimed reimagining of Pride and Prejudice. Juska never stopped marveling at how one ad transformed her life. “I expected to be murdered, or made sad at the very least,” she said. “‘I had no hope of it turning out to be anything like this.”