SEXLESS IN THE CITY

A debut memoir billed as the lighthearted chronicle of a dedicated virgin’s dating adventures.

Pseudonymous blogger Broadway begins with her home-schooled Christian youth and continues through college and out into the working world. She describes her attempt to balance her relationship with Jesus and her desperate desire to find a husband in an off-putting, pretentious manner. The book is peppered with barely relevant quotes from revered intellectual brand names (e.g., Alain de Botton), and the author likes to bemoan her inability to find people on her intellectual level. That level doesn’t seem very lofty in the frequent and ridiculous quotes from Broadway’s journal. It would take a very determined and generous reader, for example, to find any relevance to the author’s marital or spiritual state in this entry from December 10, 2000: “It seems to me, suddenly, as if I had spent quite some time fixating on sandcastles. All around me, as a child, I saw other people enjoying them…Then one day I came out of my house, and there it was: my sandcastle. As I leaned closer to inspect the exactness of the exterior, however, a curious smell assailed my nostrils. I realized the castle wasn’t sand at all—but rather shit.” In this thicket of bad prose, it’s difficult to track the author’s many failed “relationships” with ludicrously nicknamed men (“the Winner,” “Poster Boy,” etc.), most of whom appear to be unaware that they’re in a relationship at all.

Further evidence that the world does not need another histrionic, self-important blog-turned-book.