THE INS AND OUTS OF MY VAGINA

A memoir chronicles one woman’s adventures in pursuit of an orgasm (“The Big O”) from middle school to middle age.

Freeland covers “the sexy, the gross, the funny, and a lot more” in this audacious account of her sometimes amusing, sometimes alarming, and often educational escapades in discovering and exploring her sexuality from childhood to childbirth. Aiming to provide comfort, support, and camaraderie for other women who may have her former cluelessness about their own bodies, the author shares her experiences of puberty, her first kiss, losing her virginity, high school boyfriends, first encounter with pornography, partying hard in college Greek life, buying her first vibrator, and having her first orgasm. Along the way, she has a lot of sex—awkward, painful, good, great, and mind-blowing. Cute chapter titles, such as “Bushwhacked,” “Tongue Tango,” and “Good Vibrations,” hint at the anecdotes they contain. The author sometimes addresses readers directly and personifies her vagina—or more accurately, vulva—a distinction she admits to not knowing until she began writing her memoir. “V” is portrayed here as extremely impatient and constantly horny as well as a bit of a diva. The author has frequent internal conversations with V and the final epilogue is in V’s voice. Freeland’s story isn’t just salacious fun; she doesn’t shy away from more serious subjects, including broken condoms, urinary tract infections, ovarian cysts, miscarriage, ectopic and healthy pregnancies, blood, mucus plugs, and childbirth pain, complications, and recovery. Her writing is breezy, even flippant, with a gushy tone that falls somewhere between girl talk and stand-up comedy, funny quips and occasional snark. She seems to have done a prodigious amount of drinking and smoking in high school and college and sometimes provides too much detail about relatively ordinary incidents. But overall, this frank, humorous memoir is engaging, honest, and relatable.

An entertaining and candid account of one woman’s sexual escapades and coming-of-age.