LEE KOFMAN The Dangerous Bride: A memoir of love, gods and geography. Reviewed by Walter Mason
Beyond monogamy: Lee Kofman’s original, intelligent memoir explores the sexual landscape.
In an increasingly censorious age, Lee Kofman’s memoir gives the finger to the anti-sex Establishment. The Dangerous Bride is an account of a lifetime flirting with non-monogamy, and a realistic and honest meditation on the complex arrangements of human sexuality that most are too uncomfortable to acknowledge.
In 21st-century Melbourne, the Israeli émigré Kofman finds herself in a physically unsatisfying relationship with her very sexy husband. She tries everything to get the spark back into her marriage: counselling, tantric sex and even the consolations of high art. What she is ignoring is the fact that, right from the very beginning, there was something wrong with their relationship, and she herself is haunted by an intense ex-lover and her own deep curiosity about sex, others, and sex with others.
The Dangerous Bride is an original book that combines compelling memoir with journalistic enquiry (she interviews a number of people leading non-monogamous lifestyles) and deep deliberation on the sacredness of sexual connection and its varied possibilities. It is by turns an autobiography, a rollicking weekend-magazine long-form piece of investigation, and self-help book. It is constantly engaging and surprising, and Kofman’s is a refreshing voice on the Australian literary scene.
The book is also a fascinating account of bibliotherapy and the project of secret self-help that so many of us engage upon when confronted by a pressing, but socially taboo, personal problem. Kofman’s own researches take her into the eccentric world of Western Tantra, that obsesses over the orgasm, and the work of relationship guru David Schnarch. All of this stuff is big on technique, Kofman discovers, but has little to say about more fundamental questions, like how do two married people who have lost their way rediscover some kind of profound connection?
Modern attitudes towards sex are puzzling and definite answers in short supply. Most are intent on restricting the options, though we live in an age of Queer liberation and the proliferation of gender choices. As Kofman says, things remain resolutely binary in spite of generations of supposed freedom:
… wild singledom and hermetically faithful coupledom are viewed as the only intimacy options. Statistics once again supported my gut feeling that in our hypersexual times we have become at once more promiscuous and more conservative … monogamy – whether serial or lifelong, passionate or sexless – was still considered to be the only realistic model for committed relationships.
Kofman’s own account of her sexual infidelity is strangely exciting, for all of its almost quaintly old-fashioned pattern. Hopelessly stuck in a sexless marriage, she seduces a handsome wannabe writer while on a residency, giving in to the primal romantic urges of both art and desire. ‘I’d always had a weakness for men with long hair,’ she writes, reminding us of the delightfully random and completely ungovernable accidents of sexual desire.
Non-monogamy is in fact a grand literary tradition, as Kofman reminds us, discussing the unexpected case of Iris Murdoch, instead of the usual examples of the Woolfs or the Wildes. Writers, so in touch with the peccadilloes of love and perhaps less respectful of conventional restrictions, seem particularly well-suited to live outside of the mores of conventional expectations of sexual monogamy.
The intellectually engaged way in which Kofman charts the intricacy of her own desire is masterful, and something rarely encountered in memoir. She is convinced of her own outsider status, seeing most of the rest of us as firmly engaged in a project of self-denial or sexual avoidance. Even the polyamorists she encounters are bound up with rules and sexual behaviour codes, systems of shaming for those they view as sexually aberrant. Is there ever space in human culture for true sexual diversity? Kofman writes:
… my desire was darker than polyamorous and mainstream discourses allowed for. I associated excessive trustworthiness with predictability and boredom, and preferred dwelling in the shadows (and not only where love was concerned).
It is, of course, in this shadow-dwelling where magic happens, and perhaps it is no coincidence that Kofman was born in Russia, so shares in the tradition of fellow chroniclers of the human shadow, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Nabokov.
Not accepting conventional narratives that condemn swinging, adultery and outsider sex as the domains of the grotty libertine, Kofman reveals the humanity and humour, even the friendliness of such fringe pursuits. And ultimately it is her upbeat open-mindedness that brings the book most to life. The Dangerous Bride is a not a morose dwelling in murky depths. It is a very honest and constantly fascinating light held up to a world we know is out there but never dare become fully aware of.
The flawed and needy human beings that fill Kofman’s book (including, most importantly, herself and her partners) are not monsters of selfish depravity. Instead they are bookish, intelligent people with a readiness to acknowledge their own faults and a great interest in the subtleties of desire which can hold such sway over our emotions and behaviour. This book is surprising from beginning to end, and the kind of thing one is wary to press onto friends, though one wants to sings its praises from the rooftops. This response alone is proof of the continued, self-imposed, danger of Kofman’s subject.
Lee Kofman The Dangerous Bride: A memoir of love, gods and geography Melbourne University Press 2014 PB 272pp $29.99
Walter Mason is a writer, spiritual tourist and a lifelong dilettante. He is the author of Destination Saigon: Adventures in Vietnam (2010) and Destination Cambodia: Adventures in the Kingdom (2013). You can visit his blog here.
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Wow. Sounds fantastic. Definitely bumping up to the top of my TBR pile.
Debbie, you ae not going to regret it. As well as being an intriguing subject, it is dealt with in a spophisticated way and is beautifully written.