It's not that she's unhappy, per se. It's just that she's not exactly happy either.She hasn't done anything spontaneous since about 2003. Shouldn't she be running a start up? Or going backpacking? Or exploring uncharted erogenous zones with inappropriate men?Trapped between news of her mother's latent sexual awakening and her spinster aunt's odd behaviour - Julia has finally snapped. It's time to take some risks, and get a life.
Wise and witty...Losing Itiscringingly insightful about sex and dating and all the ways we tie ourselves into knots over both.' --The New York Times Book Review
A hilarious novel that Maggie Shipstead calls 'charming... witty and insightful,' about a woman who still has her virginity at the age of twenty-six, and the summer she's determined to lose it and find herself.
Julia Greenfield has a problem: she's twenty-six years old and she's still a virgin. Sex ought to be easy. People have it all the time! But, without meaning to, she made it through college and into adulthood with her virginity intact. Something's got to change.
To re-route herself from her stalled life, Julia travels to spend the summer with her mysterious aunt Vivienne in North Carolina. It's not long, however, before she unearths a confounding secret her 58 year old aunt is a virgin too. In the unrelenting heat of the southern summer, Julia becomes fixated on puzzling out what could have lead to Viv's appalling condition, all while trying to avoid the same fate.
For readers of Rainbow Rowell and Maria Semple, and filled with offbeat characters and subtle, wry humor,Losing Itis about the primal fear that you just. might. never. meet. anyone. It's about desiring something with the kind of obsessive fervor that almost guarantees you won't get it. It's about the blurry lines between sex and love, and trying to figure out which one you're going for. And it's about the decisions and non-decisions we make that can end up shaping a life.
Born in South Africa, Emma Rathbone was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she received her M.F.A. The Patterns of Paper Monsters is her debut novel. Convicted of armed robbery, 17-year-old Jacob is sentenced to a Virginia detention center. Bored, Jacob begins romancing an inmate he bumps into once in a while. But when Jacob is asked to help bring the center down, he must choose between his new relationship and the chance for escape.
