Jane Juska: Teacher who wrote sex bestseller in old age 1933-2017
Jane Juska, who has died aged 84, was the author of A Round-Heeled Woman (2003), the sparky, bestselling memoir of her exploration as a pensioner of the pleasures (and pitfalls) of sex.
In 1999, Juska was a retired, divorced schoolteacher living in California who had not been on a date, let alone in a relationship, for 27 years. “I wanted to invite a man into my life but I just couldn’t find one,” she recalled. Inspired by the plot of Eric Rohmer’s film, An Autumn Tale, she accordingly placed a personal ad in the
New York Review of Books.
Its wording was deliberately explicit: “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” The ad quickly received 63 eager replies. One included a photograph of a man wearing only sunglasses.
She decided to meet nine of the correspondents, most of whom lived on the East Coast, and with five of whom she went to bed. She later confided that she had expected “to be murdered or made sad at the very least”. But the worst that happened to her was when “Jonah the Thief” stole her champagne glasses and silk pyjamas. Jonah was over 80.
More positively, her adventure became one of self-discovery. She was cheered to meet “men who are kind and thoughtful and funny and true”. It was one of them who advised her to write up what she was doing as autobiography.
Its title came from an old term for a woman who can easily be laid on her back. She maintained that “Moby Dick is not just about some madman’s search for the whale”, but her writing was at times unabashedly descriptive, for she found that with fewer hang-ups she was much keener on sex than before.
This did not make her immune from heartbreak, and the book’s subtext was a search for romance. She fell particularly hard for a man of 32, Graham, who ultimately rejected her. “And I would like to say that that experience is no easier at 67 than it is at 17,” mused Juska. “It’s just at 67, one has less time to get over it.”
She was born Jane Murbach in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on March 7 1933. Her father was a doctor and she endured a puritanical upbringing in Archbold, a town in Ohio. She read English at the University of Michigan and later studied at Berkeley, California.
By the early 1970s she had separated from her husband, Joe, whom she claimed had consistently belittled her, and was struggling to bring up their son, who eventually ran away to live on the streets. (He later straightened out his life. Understandably, perhaps, he chose not to read her memoir.)
Down in the dumps, she became fat — weight she later lost — and consigned love to the past. Instead she focused on her work and spent more than 30 years teaching English at schools, colleges and in San Quentin prison.
After her book was turned into a play, with Sharon Gless as Juska, which toured the US and was seen in London’s West End in 2011, Juska wrote a sequel, An Unaccompanied Woman, in 2008. This chronicled how her life had changed, largely for the better, since being designated a septuagenarian “sexpert”.
She observed that only now did she understand the last line of Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge: “Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” Two years ago, she published Mrs Bennet Has Her Say ,a portrait of the marriage of the parents of the heroine of Pride and Prejudice.
Daily Telegraph, London
She was cheered to meet ‘men who are kind and thoughtful and funny and true’