Memoirist of late-life sexual adventures
As Jane Juska — divorced, lonely and 66 — watched Eric Rohmer’s film Autumn Tale in 1999 in a theatre in Berkeley, Calif., she was swept up by the story, in which a married woman secretly places a personal advertisement in a newspaper for a widowed friend who believes it is too late for her to find love.
Why not, Juska wondered, do something similar for herself ?
Seeking to meet intelligent men, she bought an ad in the personals section of The New York Review of Books. Not wishing to overspend on the ad, she winnowed her piquant message to these memorable words, which cost her $ 4.55 each: “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”
More than 60 letters arrived quickly, forwarded by The New York Review in manila envelopes. One included a nude photo; another was filled with sexual promises.
Juska’ s encounters formed the basis of A RoundHeeled Woman: My LateLife Adventures in Sex and Romance, a memoir, published in 2003, that followed her from her prudish Midwestern roots to her liberated flings and brought her to Oprah Winfrey and Charlie Rose’s television talk shows to tell her story.
Juska, who wrote two other books, died Oct. 24 in Chino, Calif. She was 84. Her son Andrew said the cause was respiratory failure.
“I wanted to be t he woman I was never able to be, a woman who delights in intimacy with a man, not fears it,” she wrote, adding, “I wanted to get fat on the bounty of men.”
But her book ( the title refers to an old slang phrase for a promiscuous woman) is not only an accounting of her belated carnal adventures. Nor is it a real-life precursor to E. L. James’s 2011 best seller, Fifty Shades of Grey.
Rather, it is a story — funny, heartbreaking, erudite, critics have said — about her Victorian upbringing in Archbold, Ohio, bad marriage, single motherhood, struggle with obesity, enlightenment through psychoanalysis and passion for teaching.
“Freud wrote that men desire women but women desire men’s desire of them,” she wrote. “I suppose so, but to my mind, women are missing a lot if they’re satisfied only with flared nostrils and heavy breathing.”
Jesse Kornbluth, in an essay for The Huffington Post in 2006, wrote that while Juska “insists she’s looking for a sexual hookup, you can’t read this book without seeing how much more she really wants — and why the immensity of real desire is more than she can acknowledge.”
“Because,” he added, “she wants what women half her age want: She wants it all.”
Jane Murbach was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., on March 7, 1933. Her father, Edwin, was a doctor, and her mother, the former Helen Wilson, was a homemaker.
She graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in English and later studied at the University of California, Berkeley, without receiving a master’s degree. Her marriage to Joe Juska, an executive for the federal government in Atlanta, was loveless and filled with arguments, she wrote. It ended in divorce in the early 1970s.
“My e x - husband j ust wanted me to collapse intellectually,” she told The Times in 2006. He died in 2011.
Juska moved to California after her divorce and rarely dated. Instead, she focused on raising her son and teaching high school English in Concord, at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, and to inmates at San Quentin State Prison.
“Except for a couple of unhappy skirmishes, my relationship with men was nonexistent,” she told The Times in 2003.
“Romantic trouble?” she added. “That was too much.”
But she realized that romantic trouble — and the possibility of falling in love — could result from seeing any of the men who answered her ad.
“You have to know you’re vulnerable to everything,” s he t old Rose in 2003. “I thought I could die. I thought I could be beaten up. I thought I could get a disease. I also thought I could be very happy. I thought that I could have companionship.”
A play based on A RoundHeeled Woman was written by Jane Prowse and performed in several cities, sometimes with Sharon Gless as Juska.
When the play ran in London, with Gless, critic Lyn Gardner of The Guardian wrote that “the journey to multiple orgasms is actually one of self- discovery, meaning the play never strays beyond ‘ naughty but nice’ territory.”
Juska followed A RoundHeeled Woman with a s equel, Unaccompanied Women ( 2006) and Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say ( 2015), which The Chicago Tribune called “a brilliant, hilarious, addictively readable reimagining of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.”
Her son said in an interview that he had never read A Round-Heeled Woman.
“I tell people,” he said, “‘If your mother wrote it, I’d probably read it.’ ”