Mara Altman's unusual memoir, Thanks For Coming, is subtitled “One Young Woman’s Quest for An Orgasm” and “quest” is definitely the word.
At 26, Altman had never had an orgasm, so she embarks on a yearlong search for satisfaction. The tiny, feminine Altman’s personality improbably shape shifts through the various chest-thumpingly macho stereotypes of male adventure fiction. You can imagine her as the big-game hunter in a dusty safari helmet, stalking the elusive, man-eating orgasm through dense jungle, mountain climes and malaria-infested swamps, or as the grim, inexhaustible gumshoe, chasing down every lead no matter how ridiculous in order to solve The Case of The Missing Orgasm. Or you can see her as the young Native American brave venturing out into the forest in search of the mighty spirit orgasm of our ancestors and the wisdom that follows in its wake, hoping to return as a full-fledged warrior and be granted a new name honoring the vision: Little O?
Altman fears her body—her alienation from her genitalia is so fierce it borders on autism. In one early passage, she grimly liquors up and forces herself to find out what’s going on down there: “I took another sip, and then I plunged my hand into my crevasse like I would a clogged sink, apprehensive about discovering the culprit behind the blockage but trying to get the chore done expeditiously. I felt around a bit. Not so terrible, really. Okay, mildly disgusting. Like mushy banana.”
What saves Altman’s tale from being another joyless young woman’s voyage of selfdiscovery is not just her crack (and cracked) sense of humor but also her charismatic cluelessness.
Altman seems to have considerable insight into every subject except Mara Altman. Equal parts dogged and evasive, she thoughtfully and methodically identifies every dead-end in order to establish the way forward by process of elimination… and then grimly pursues every wrong option so she can avoid reaching the goal she so desires.
She solicits advice from a muffin-pushing Punjabi monk in Union Square who shouts cryptic directives about her “flower” while other customers roll their eyes, waiting to be rung up. She braves the gulag of Internet dating, the seedy imperial hedonism of Thai strip clubs and the dark recesses of a BDSM dungeon in Jersey City. After months of wrangling, she garners an audience with Nicole Daedone, the guru of the OneTaste sex cult in San Francisco, only to hideously botch the interview. She infiltrates a secretive Oregon commune dedicated solely to the female orgasm where she proves to be such a tough nut to crack that she is invited back.
One Thanksgiving, she wallpapers her parents’ house with flyers soliciting insight on the orgasm from her parents’ guests. She crashes a sex conference in Indiana and bum-rushes the mic: “Hi. I’m Mara Altman, and I’m trying to have my first orgasm. If any of you have any pointers, please let me know.” Anyone?... Bueller?...Anyone? Despite her serial egregious missteps, the story never devolves into slapstick, grounded as it is by the sincerity of her mission. Though the book’s subject may seem trivial at first glance, what’s behind Altman’s problem is what’s behind many of our problems: loneliness, self-loathing and competing desire for, and fear of, intimacy. The stakes couldn’t be higher for her, as she courageously subjects herself to some hard kicks, each time dusting herself off and trying again. She does experience some memorable triumphs. And, good times or bad, you just can’t fucking believe she’s writing this down: “I’d totally missed the ass-eating memo. My butt was being enlightened. My butt was happy. My butt was angry I’d gone 26 years without doing this before. I wanted to send this memo out. I wanted to spam everyone’s inboxes with it. I wanted everyone to get their asses gnawed on at some point.The world would be better for it.”
I met up with Altman on chilly spring day. We had arranged to meet at Happy Ending but, poetically, we were denied—what kind of bar isn’t open at five? Don’t these people know we’re in a recession? We adjourned to another local bar to talk about her book.
Altman is short, cute and totally fuckable. Her ass appears to be as good as she brags on it being, but having only been able to check it out once, I can’t swear to it. I was a little nervous to talk to her, knowing as much as I did about her junk. In the book, she makes some groundbreaking contributions to the already extensive lexicon celebrating the female parts, most notably “orgasm gear” and “crotchular region.” (My eagerness to spell “crotchular” in a Scrabble game with my mom is only outmatched by my reluctance to define it for her.)
Mara’s jungle area may not be an actual jungle, but is at the very least a petting zoo. It includes not just the antiquated “beaver” and the predictable “pussy” but also the most unsettling euphemism I’ve heard to date: an inside-out bat flying backward. But Bukowski called his cock a “purple onion” and Fred Exley called his “the frightful hog” so I guess it’s in a literary tradition.
We talked about the book, then roommates and Greenpoint and writing habits (she wrote most of the book sitting on her couch) over a glass of wine. But what do you ask a writer who has been naked in every sense of the word from the first page of her book? By the second glass, we were just talking about love.
anonymous
