Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man

Discovering this book changed my life. I read it some years before I discovered the writings of Camille Paglia, parts of which can be seen as supplying intellectual cover for narratives such as Sleeping with Soldiers. The nature and intensity of sexual desire and of the willingness to tempt fate varies widely across individuals. Thus a few women will feel lust as intensely as 19 year old boys, and will also give rein to it in the irresponsible male way. Women who have done this have seldom gone on to write about it, if only because a wise age-old reluctance to kiss and tell. That there are many wannabe Daniells out there is attested to by the hundreds of thousands of women who have put explicit but anonymous digital snapshots of themselves on the web. Anyone who has lived in the American South, as I have, will recognise the Rosemary Daniell type, a rawer version of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Daniell's formal education may be spotty, but she definitely shares in the South's literary gift. Sleeping with Soldiers is a real page turner, while I can't read more than 10 pages of Erica Jong without falling asleep. I concur with the views of the approving reviewer above who, apparently using her real name, had the courage to say that she had a past like Daniell's.

Daniell's memoir of her exploration of the wildness within herself, and its expression through her sexuality, is unique in the canon of women's writing. Few women authors dare to suggest that when women seek wild men, they do so because they wish to become like them, to let their own wildness run free. Daniell, a feminist, suggests that love of men and of all the joys and tribulations of love and sex with them can be freeing when women look to those aspects of themselves which are like men. She also makes a strong statement for the fact that true love between men and women cannot be possible without acceptance of all the darker sides of the self, and recognition that even after emotional pain, joy is possible. Her travels throughout the south and the wilder west of Montana and Colorado expose her to men and women of all kinds, and in the end one has a tremendous respect and love for all the complexity of men and women in this country. A truly remarkable, groundbreaking book; Erica Jong should write so well, and so frankly (there's nothing coy about Daniell's prose). For me, a woman with similar experiences, reading this book was truly liberating. It remains one of the treasures of my vast library, one I have reread more than once.