Why Do Women Write More Letters That They Send?: A Meditation on the Loneliness of the Sexes

An erudite and captivating book which draws upon, and analyses, with convincing insight, aspects of the loneliness of the lives of people - both famous and ordinary - and characters in literature as well as examining situations common to many members of either sex. In this book you are bound to find yourself and your feelings being exposed regularly. I warrant you'll find yourself remarking: "Is that what other people think/ expereince too??"I enjoyed the way Leader - a polymath but not an intimidating one - could dip into people's lives to illustarte the points he wishes to make. For example:"Brahms preserved this idealised love for Clara Schumann for so long while directing his sexual desires to prostitutes or their representatives. Goethe too... would keep, at certain points in his life, the idealized Lady at a distance while entertaining sexual relations with women of lower station whom he did not love. Often a man will find himself sexually fettered to a woman the moment he has finally established a love relation with someone else, showing this human necessity of doubling the object."The illumination Leader affords often comes from his ability to examine and draw significant meaning from experiences and encounters which we may have cast aside as not meriting any probing. But he also takes on the perplexing. Speaking of the issue of the riddles set by princesses to young men in fairy tales he offers the following:"To maintain the dimension of the riddle, for a woman, is to sustain desire, to keep the man from knowing too much and so guarantee that desire continues. The problem is that the choice between two options for a woman here is not always easy: finding the right person not to understand one, to respect the riddle, or the wrong person to understand. Perhaps the person who understands is always the wrong person, and the problem with the right person, is that, very simply he doesn't understand."Leader has an ability to translate lucidly the thoughts of leading psychoanalysts (especially Lacan and Freud) so that those of us not steeped in such thinking, can perhaps begin to appreciate what is being pointed to in their works. For example:"[Men] panic about the very possibility of getting into a panic, in other words, about losing their self-control, about disappearing as masters of themselves. Indeed... while a woman may organise her fantasy life so as to stress her own disappearing, a man does his best to avoid precisely this disappearance: it is the one thing he must devote his life to guarding against. To use Lacan's analogy, he constructs for himself an immense fortress to protect against this. The price to be paid is the tedium and discomfort of living in a town under seige. The better the defences, the worse this will be. He will always be imagining what this fortification looks like from the outside, without recognising what it means to be living on the inside."Why this remarkable book is not much better known is a mystery in itself