Getting Attention: Senior Sex
For those who were disappointed that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn’t about “old people getting it on,” a new book takes on the topic. Scary Old Sex: Stories (Macmillan/Bloomsbury; OverDrive Sample), a debut short story collection by Arlene Heyman, a practicing psychiatrist is soaring up the Amazon charts, jumping from #6,527 to #303.
In his recent NYT’s review, Dwight Garner praises the collection of stories largely concerned with sex and love past a certain age, saying it is “rueful and funny and observant” and that a few of the stories “take startling turns and have edges made from razor wire.”
While acknowledging that some of the stories are not completely successful, Garner says “Ms. Heyman is never an uninteresting writer … These men and women are busily and blissfully humanizing themselves, the kind of bliss that lifts right off the page.”
Heyman, 73, has been writing privately for decades. Once a student of Bernard Malamud’s, she put that career on the back burner to train as a pyschiatrist. Garner says that readers “can be glad she didn’t abandon it completely, and has been slowly composing these mature and soulful stories.”