PT BOOKSHELF
Ant Hill Press, $24.95
Knopf, $21
Sex can be a source of both pleasure and suffering, as these two books make clear. In Making Love Again, Virginia and Keith Laken describe in intimate detail their struggle with impotence. It is their struggle, even though it is Keith's impotence. Together they recount the various treatments, the anxious moments and the false hopes, the good sex and the bad, the cures that weren't. And they report the corresponding rise and fall of their relationship--all with such unreserved honesty that the book is a genuine page-turner. Susanna Kaysen struggles with a different sort of sex-related problem in the strangely titled, The Camera My Mother Gave Me. At middle age, Kaysen's vagina became chronically painful, and exquisitely painful during intercourse. She tells us about the discomfort, her meetings with various doctors and a less than understanding boyfriend, all with a dark humor that makes us wince as we smile. A novelist, Kaysen is also author of Far Afield (Vintage, 1994), and we wish, for her sake, that this book were a work of fiction.
