Book review: With My Body

Book: With My Body
Author: Nikki Gemmell
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 484
Price: Rs399

There is a small disclaimer written in vibrant pink on the cover of Nikki Gemmell’s sequel to The Bride Stripper Bare: “Contains adult material.”

A few pages in and there’s nothing to suggest adult content, unless you count a bored  and desperate housewife. That is, at best, foreplay. A few chapters in, on the other hand, and With My Body may have you reaching for ice. It’s that hot.  

Most of us have grown up with our own version of erotica, smuggling the forbidden books under bedcovers and secretly exchanging them with girlfriends. If not anything else, we’ve done our share of reading out the “interesting” parts of Mills & Boons paperbacks, Cosmopolitan and the odd Penthouse. Consequently, no matter how expansive or limited your exposure, you think you’ve read it all. Enter Nikki Gemmell. This is not the kind of book too many will be comfortable reading aloud to girlfriends; some parts will have you squirming, but you will be reading compulsively till the end.  

With My Body is the story of a woman’s sexual awakening, from the first touch to her “core” to the first time she realises the power of being able to “transform” another person.  Gemmell hauls readers out of their comfort zones and headlong into a fantastic exploration of their bodies and sexuality. Instead of the third person or first person narrator, Gemmell keeps referring to her heroine as “you”, in an effort to establish an empathetic connection between reader and subject.

A suburban wife and mother of three is faced with a sense of loss of identity and the feeling that her husband will never fully understand her. So far so Madame Bovary, but her means of coming to terms with her disillusionment is to reminisce about an old love affair while going through a Victorian-era book of women’s etiquette that is filled with meticulous notes written by a past lover.

As she flips the pages of the guidebook, the reader learns of her first disappointing experience with sex. Then she meets Ptolemy, or Tol, a struggling writer who is much older than her. He is at first wary of having such a young girl in his life. After much persuasion, Tol agrees to become her teacher, initiating her into a sexual awakening. The notes in the book are his love letters to her.

The Victorian handbook is organised into a set of lessons (one per chapter). Each lesson — understanding love, marriage and motherhood; understanding the emotions that accompany loss; learning to use one’s body; opening up and letting go; and most important of all, of understanding one’s needs and responding to them — acts as a parallel to Tol’s more improper teachings. Reading the book, she goes on a journey from present boredom to an exciting past of sexual bliss and finally returns to a future of reborn romance.

The story zips along at a nice pace. From a shy schoolgirl who is vying for the attention of her father, our narrator metamorphoses into a young girl well aware of herself and her body and ready to explore both.

With Your Body isn’t without its flaws. The second person narrative takes getting used to. The narrator is a young schoolgirl — a little more than 14 — when she meets Tol, which technically makes him a paedophile. The sexual politics aren’t helped by the sex scenes involving paintbrushes and chains and handcuffs, which could appear distasteful to some. While Tol stresses the sex is consensual, there isn’t any mention of contraception. Shouldn’t that have been one of the more important lessons for a schoolgirl being taught the subject of sex education?

Not everyone will like this book. But it would help if you believe that at the core of the story is a championing for a woman’s need for intimacy and the acceptance of her sexual desires.