- Spencer's memoir is a touching, honest look into the intimate lives of a few and a deeper look into the author's own inner conflict with sexuality.
- I must applaud Spencer for her tremendous courage to stay brutally honest and vulnerable with her own sexual fears and discoveries. Anyone who comes across this book will not only better understand their own unique sexual identity, but will laugh and cry with Suzy, and in the end, have a well of compassion for all she comes in contact with.
- Her conversations and experiences are at times laugh-out-loud funny, at times gut-wrenching, and readers will walk away from Secret Sex Lives with a new take on sexual activities and social strictures.
- Full of thoughtfulness and self-deprecation, Spencer explains how easily the lines between professional and personal relationships can become blurred. Spencer's writing takes a confessional form, and her apprehensive yet absolute honesty is completely endearing as she reveals how this journey changed her views.
- Although Spencer fondly refers to her interview subjects as 'my sex freaks,' it's her personal journey that really shows just what lovable freaks we all are -- whether it's our taste for leather or our fear of intimacy.
- The book started out as a journalistic endeavor but evolved into a memoir, a bold decision for Ms. Spencer, a born-again Christian who nearly went to seminary.
- A Barnes & Noble Editor's Recommendation "Much more than a racy expose, Secret Sex Lives shows us diverse people in real-life situations. A revealing look at touching encounters."
- ‘Worn out from all the tragedy’ of a decade of penning true crime books, Spencer (Wages of Sin, 2010) engagingly steers readers through the wonderful world of contemporary sexuality...Both a celebration of sexuality and, for the author, an embracive awakeningto it.
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A MEMOIR
Publishers Weekly Fall 2012 Editors’ Pick, Memoir
Barnes & Noble Editor’s Recommendation
Creative Loafing, Tampa Bay, Top 10 Most Provocative Books 2012
Writers’ League of Texas 2013 Book Awards Finalist, Nonfiction
Kinsey Confidential Recommended Book
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Secret Sex Lives:
A Year on the Fringes of American SexualityNew York Times bestselling author Suzy Spencer posted a simple online request: “Need to talk about sex…”
Suzy Spencer set out to investigate sex in America—to go beyond the talk and find out what people are really doing in their private (or not so private) lives. What she discovered online, at sex clubs, and elsewhere was truly eye-opening.
She started talking to men and women—from across America of all ages and sexual orientations—who make no apology for how they fire their imaginations and satisfy their desires. Soon she found herself invited to be a voyeur—listening in on phone sex, reading e-mails describing sexual encounters in graphic detail, and attending BDSM mixers and workshops. It was all astonishing…and enticing. At every turn she felt herself pulled deeper into people’s secret lives and began questioning her own choices about relationships and sex. Secret Sex Lives is an intimate account of a journalist who is seduced by her subject; a woman who sets out to look behind closed doors but ends up on a personal, revealing journey to find herself…
