Scary Old Sex ─ Stories

For fans of Alice Munro and Edith Pearlman, a stunning debut collection of short stories about aging, relationships, and intimacy.

Scary Old Sex was written and rewritten over a period of thirty years. In her youth, Arlene Heyman had been a promising writer, studying with Bernard Malamud at Bennington College, earning an M.A. from the Syracuse University writing program, teaching literature, publishing stories. But her life changed course once she entered medical school; although she always wrote in quiet moments, she went on to work as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst while raising her sons. Now Bloomsbury is bringing to light these mature and accomplished stories, the fruit of a lifetime.

In this taboo-breaking debut, Heyman gives us what really goes on in people's minds and relationships--those things left unspoken in much of society, about sex between older people, or about sex and love when one person is very ill, or when the age difference makes the relationship practically illegal. Love and sex in these stories are sometimes seen through the wide-open eyes of women, with women often in dominant roles in relationships. Looking behind the curtain at the intimacies we usually keep to ourselves, a few of the stories are raw, many are unsettling, but all are insightful and at times comical.

Not intended to be titillating, Heyman's stories give us the lives we all live: shocking, sloppy, human.

Arlene Heyman is the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright, Rockefeller, and Robert Wood Johnson fellowships. She published in theNew American Review and other journals, won Epoch magazine's novella contest, and has been listed twice in the honor rolls ofThe Best American Short Stories. Heyman is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, where she lives with her husband. She is currently at work on a novel.