Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex »

Hephzibah Anderson graduated from Cambridge University with an English degree and has worked as a journalist ever since. She was the fiction editor at the Daily Mail and covered fiction for the Observer. Her recent work has appeared in Vogue and Bloomberg Muse and on BBC Radio.

Seeking love in an age obsessed with sex, a journalist chronicles her year without

On the eve of her thirtieth birthday, Hephzibah Anderson glimpsed her college boyfriend going into a jewelry store with a smiling blonde-and in that moment realized it had been years since a man told her he loved her. This discovery led her to question a decade of emotionally frustrating relationships with commitment phobes. As she examined her past, she recognized that most of these relationships went off course at the precise moment sex was involved. Anderson decided it was time to spend a full year without sex to rediscover its meaning and purpose in her life. In this confessional account, Anderson shares the results of that year, narrating each month as she flirts, dates, and swoons but doesn't have sex. The results-her feelings about femininity, her body, and romance-are illuminating.

Told with Elizabeth Gilbertesque candor, Chastened reveals much about our contradictory cultural attitudes towards sex and the ways intercourse has been used as a shortcut to deeper intimacies. An antidote to the growing genre of another-notch-in-the-bedpost memoirs, Chastened is a refreshing look at what's to be gained by going without.

Publishers Weekly

Everything but the sex seems to be the theme of this fluffy dating chronicle by British journalist Anderson. Having recently turned 30 and being determined to break a baffling, bruising cycle of “consistently mistak[ing] casual hookups for rose-tinted beginnings,” Anderson decided that she'd had enough sex without love; it was time to try love without sex. The purpose? Not, as she hints with feminist bravado, to become “faithful to my instincts” nor even to achieve “emotional self-sufficiency” (as she enjoyed some playful banter with potential boyfriends like Dan, Jake, Quiet Guy, the Beau, N, Rafiq, and so on), but to snare a mate—and that sadly didn't happen at the end of this year. Using an unwieldy chronological structure by month, Anderson moves from her resolve to embark on a year of chastity after a final emotional disappointment with Jake in late summer (“You sleep with these men too soon,” her mother had warned her), through numerous travels and dissatisfying encounters between London and New York. Along with way, Anderson lards each chapter with ponderous emotional reflections, injecting just enough research and quotes from heavies to keep the reader engaged, such as brief mentions of psychotherapist Brett Kahr, a Hepburn-Tracy movie, chastity rites in ancient times, and Samuel Richardson's Pamela.(June)

Introduction xi

1 My First Time 1

2 ...And My Last 20

3 September or Dressing Around 34

4 October or Brief Encounters 56

5 November or At the Movies 77

6 December or Party Time 94

7 January or Sexual Sobriety 109

8 February or Romance on the Dance Floor 128

9 March or Swooning to Conquer 145

10 April ... in London 162

11 April in New York or Chasing Tales 184

12 May and June or Vive la Différence! 195

13 July or Mirror, Mirror 214

14 August or What a Woman Wants 228

Epilogue 243

Acknowledgments 263