"Over the Hill and Between the Sheets" Talks About Middle Aged Sex -- And Much More

Sex in middle age was once treated like an embarrassing disease -- the less said about it, the better. No longer."Over the Hill and Between the Sheets: Sex, Love, and Lust in Middle Age," a new collection of essays, midlife sex is brought out into the open, and shown to be more complicated and more interesting than the oh-so-simple coupling of young adults.

But the book is about more than sex; it's really about sexual relationships past, present, and future. The contributors provide a variety of perspectives: single; long-term married, recently divorced, remarried. They write about dating, spouses, surprising pregnancy, vibrators, ex-lovers, and death.

Many of the contributions have an exceptional level of writerly craft. It's full of juicy turns of phrase. Alice Elliott Dark: "Middle age is one big map of roads not taken, past and present." Cameron Stracher in Las Vegas: " I imagine how I will feel when another young woman looks past me, when my own body revolts me, when my career seems paltry, foolish, and ill-advised." Helene Stapinski: " At the end of the day, after the yelling, and the throwing things, and the ugliness and the therapy and the fantastic sex, at the end of it all, we are still old friends." Shaun Assael on why he and his wife work: "Two mysterious people in the same relationship wouldn't work anyway. An invisible moving force needs a stationary object for it to slam into to take shape."

Some of the most memorable pieces are:

• Alice Elliott Dark's account of an unconsummated attraction. Was it an affair?
• Helene Stapinski finding that her girlfriends aren't blameless for their passionless marriages
• Susan Cheever on increasing sexual pleasure with age -- and gaining the freedom to separate sex from emotion
• Ann Hood's moving story about a horrible tragedy and its impact on her faith and marriage.
• Deborah Caldwell on catching up to the "right" number of sexual partners

There are others that are equally strong.

At one level, the book is about sex and love; but it's also about life. Life doesn't stop when you get married ... or divorced, or when you have kids or when they leave home. It twists and turns, deepening in some areas and receding in others. Sexual relationships are the starting point for investigating life itself.

After finishing the book, with stories happy, funny, and sad, one is left knowing that middle age is a time of rich experiences. As we age and life gets more complicated, perhaps we get better at living it.

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The Boston Globe wrote that "there are many wonderful essays" in the volume, and the Chicago Sun-Times called it "a standout ... sexy ... stellar contributors." Reviewers at Amazon have been complimentary.

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