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mveldeivendran's review
3.0
I thank Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Publications for the opportunity to review this memoir in exchange for my review.
The Memoir is about a woman's obsession with Porn and Sexual fantasies, and her battle to confront the feeling of guilt every time she'd finished with her countless adventures around the world, and how she'd managed to recover being an addict (or at least obliterating that guilty feeling due self-destructive patterns). I felt the book is brutally honest with the way things are portrayed like Henry Miller's kind though I'm still yet to read his. To avoid misconceptions, it's nothing like an erotica (I can say this since I tried one by Sasha Grey) but the psychological battle amongst emotion, numbness, recognition and self-destructive habitual patterns. If she happens to write more, I'll make sure to read that one as well.
Erica Garza's essays have appeared in Salon, Narratively, BUST, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Refinery29, Bustle, Cosmopolitan, HelloGiggles, The Los Angeles Review and Australia's Mamamia and The Motherish. She has appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 4, Thom Hartmann's "The Big Picture" and August McLaughlin's Girl Boner Radio. In 2010, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University. "GETTING OFF", her memoir on sex addiction, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2018.
Born in Los Angeles to Mexican parents, Erica has spent most of her adult life traveling and living abroad in such places as Florence, London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Bogota, Bali, Bangkok, Koh Samui, Chennai, Melbourne and the island of Maui. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. From www.ericagarza.com
The Book is available from January 09, 2018.
The Memoir is about a woman's obsession with Porn and Sexual fantasies, and her battle to confront the feeling of guilt every time she'd finished with her countless adventures around the world, and how she'd managed to recover being an addict (or at least obliterating that guilty feeling due self-destructive patterns). I felt the book is brutally honest with the way things are portrayed like Henry Miller's kind though I'm still yet to read his. To avoid misconceptions, it's nothing like an erotica (I can say this since I tried one by Sasha Grey) but the psychological battle amongst emotion, numbness, recognition and self-destructive habitual patterns. If she happens to write more, I'll make sure to read that one as well.
Erica Garza's essays have appeared in Salon, Narratively, BUST, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Refinery29, Bustle, Cosmopolitan, HelloGiggles, The Los Angeles Review and Australia's Mamamia and The Motherish. She has appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 4, Thom Hartmann's "The Big Picture" and August McLaughlin's Girl Boner Radio. In 2010, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University. "GETTING OFF", her memoir on sex addiction, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2018.
Born in Los Angeles to Mexican parents, Erica has spent most of her adult life traveling and living abroad in such places as Florence, London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Bogota, Bali, Bangkok, Koh Samui, Chennai, Melbourne and the island of Maui. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. From www.ericagarza.com
The Book is available from January 09, 2018.
reverenddave's review
3.0
I'd never read an addiction biography before. Discovered its not really my thing. So, I suppose the star rating reflects my personal ambivalence to the topic more so than any judgement of the book itself.
ordinary's review
fast-paced
1.0
It just felt like I was reading a very boring dairy of a vain girl desperately trying to find herself. Sure it spoke about sex and porn addiction but that wasn't the focus of this story. I wasn't impressed at all.
amywhereonearth's review
3.0
I really enjoyed reading this book and found it to be similar to Dolly Alderton's all I know about love, but maybe just a bit rougher around the edges. It's incredibly relatable, even for those not suffering from addictions can most likely relate to feelings of inadequacy that need to be faced in order to live a healthy life. Garza really manages to remove some of the stigma behind healing.
Some of the articulations of feelings surrounding sex were incredibly deep and though provoking. A credit mainly to her writing style.
Some of the articulations of feelings surrounding sex were incredibly deep and though provoking. A credit mainly to her writing style.
fer3tt's review
4.0
PESADO. Primeiro livro que ''li'' por audiobook e foi uma experiencia totalmente nova. Um livro explicito e cru na escrita que fez eu me sentir desconfortavel nas primeiras horas ao ouvir o audiobook. Foi dificil de engolir, tive que parar varias vezes durante a ''leitura'' e fiquei mal de verdade por uns 4 dias depois de terminar. Me identifiquei muito com algumas partes, o que fez mais dificil ainda de ouvir. Não sei se recomendo. É brutal, denso, cru e intenso, uma das leituras mais fortes que eu fiz esse ano.
suddenflamingword's review
1.0
All the platitudes of bravery and openness aside - and acknowledging the reality of this book's gesture towards frankness in a patriarchal society is a valid point - this feels like a memoir for the Eat, Pray, Love and Goop audience. It grips like a PG-13 version of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Which is to say it reads as deeply bourgeois, monotonous, and penny wise pound foolish.
For the good, maybe one could say with Garza that "if there had been more research and more discussion about sexual addiction in women, would I have changed my behavior?" This is her rebuttal to that question.
But then you see a list like this (all of which came out before Garza's book) you realize it's not a matter of another book to stock store shelves, but social norms which there are explicit political attempts to uphold conservative ideas of society. Norms which Garza herself grew up with, but which are never explored in Getting Off.
Much like how her privilege is given the obligatory check, but skimmed over otherwise. Which becomes more obvious at the end when she and her to-be husband go through the Hoffman Process after spending a week in Thailand, after months earlier meeting in a yoga class in Bali. A Process which costs ~$5,000. But I digress.
Perhaps the main problem with the book is hinted at by all this. On one hand it has no core. Her conclusion for the reader is "when you have a chronic fear of ordinariness, you can convince yourself that your trauma actually isn’t trauma at all" so you must assign proper blame to this trauma. But we are resistant to this because "we’re scared of what comes next. Change." There is no "cure." Only "things [which offer] opportunities to know [yourself] better" (like the $5,000 Hoffman Process). And this is what we have to aim for. It's a fine yet impressively milquetoast conclusion for a memoir about the travails of sex-addiction.
The other hand, though, reveals that this moral development is at odds with what actually happened. What actually mark the moments of Garza's change throughout the book is bucking the oppressive social anxieties which she had held onto and which opened her up to social interactions with accepting ears, alongside people who equally wanted no truck with these oppressive norms and equally struggled against them. As her Bali teacher said, "'in the West, to behave like this might land you in an institution. But in India, you’re revered as a guru.'” Were this more a psychological memoir than a self-help travelogue, this would easily lead back to the adoption of a strictly suburban Catholic upbringing within a patriarchal, racist culture. It does not.
It's not for no reason that she says that the Hoffman Process (to reiterate, $5,000) "taught me to reclaim the girl I was at twelve, her insecurities, her self-hatred, her coping mechanisms, all of her" at the end of the book. It's in these socially enforced insecurities, self-hatreds, and toxic coping mechanisms that these problems develop. Garza's solution of jet-setting to 'exotic' locales - which she implicitly partly attributes to her improvement - is quite literally the opposite of this. It's a very American solution to internal conflict whose conclusion of not being "cured" (and ending in a bisexual shower threeway) smacks so much of neoliberal doublespeak around "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" that I had to double-take.
I'm glad that Garza acknowledges that "I’m a girl and I am sexual. I’m a girl and I have desires. I’m a girl and I am proud. Look at me looking at you" in the end. However, I'm not sure what was accomplished in acknowledging this. Nothing, I suppose, but the mirror of social acceptance.
For the good, maybe one could say with Garza that "if there had been more research and more discussion about sexual addiction in women, would I have changed my behavior?" This is her rebuttal to that question.
But then you see a list like this (all of which came out before Garza's book) you realize it's not a matter of another book to stock store shelves, but social norms which there are explicit political attempts to uphold conservative ideas of society. Norms which Garza herself grew up with, but which are never explored in Getting Off.
Much like how her privilege is given the obligatory check, but skimmed over otherwise. Which becomes more obvious at the end when she and her to-be husband go through the Hoffman Process after spending a week in Thailand, after months earlier meeting in a yoga class in Bali. A Process which costs ~$5,000. But I digress.
Perhaps the main problem with the book is hinted at by all this. On one hand it has no core. Her conclusion for the reader is "when you have a chronic fear of ordinariness, you can convince yourself that your trauma actually isn’t trauma at all" so you must assign proper blame to this trauma. But we are resistant to this because "we’re scared of what comes next. Change." There is no "cure." Only "things [which offer] opportunities to know [yourself] better" (like the $5,000 Hoffman Process). And this is what we have to aim for. It's a fine yet impressively milquetoast conclusion for a memoir about the travails of sex-addiction.
The other hand, though, reveals that this moral development is at odds with what actually happened. What actually mark the moments of Garza's change throughout the book is bucking the oppressive social anxieties which she had held onto and which opened her up to social interactions with accepting ears, alongside people who equally wanted no truck with these oppressive norms and equally struggled against them. As her Bali teacher said, "'in the West, to behave like this might land you in an institution. But in India, you’re revered as a guru.'” Were this more a psychological memoir than a self-help travelogue, this would easily lead back to the adoption of a strictly suburban Catholic upbringing within a patriarchal, racist culture. It does not.
It's not for no reason that she says that the Hoffman Process (to reiterate, $5,000) "taught me to reclaim the girl I was at twelve, her insecurities, her self-hatred, her coping mechanisms, all of her" at the end of the book. It's in these socially enforced insecurities, self-hatreds, and toxic coping mechanisms that these problems develop. Garza's solution of jet-setting to 'exotic' locales - which she implicitly partly attributes to her improvement - is quite literally the opposite of this. It's a very American solution to internal conflict whose conclusion of not being "cured" (and ending in a bisexual shower threeway) smacks so much of neoliberal doublespeak around "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" that I had to double-take.
I'm glad that Garza acknowledges that "I’m a girl and I am sexual. I’m a girl and I have desires. I’m a girl and I am proud. Look at me looking at you" in the end. However, I'm not sure what was accomplished in acknowledging this. Nothing, I suppose, but the mirror of social acceptance.
kennethwade's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
3.75
I appreciate the author’s vulnerability and honesty in this memoir. I also like that she remains sex-positive despite her struggle with sex addiction. I wish that she had addressed her privileges more with being able to travel so often and afford amazing vacations etc. Bonus points for talking about bisexuality.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Emotional abuse, Infidelity, Sexual content, and Toxic relationship
readingfarandwide's review
4.0
I love memoirs, especially ones that deal with topics that I don't have any real life experience with. They give me insight into what other people struggle with and that is something I highly value in a world where empathy is not the default approach towards other human beings.
Getting Off is the story of the author's sex and porn addiction which is almost always considered to be a problem exclusive to men. This is due to the fact that women are conditioned to hide their sexuality and treat it as a taboo subject. Also, the collective obsession with women's 'purity' is another culprit here. It is still a widespread idea that talking about women's desires, their porn watching habits or about them having multiple sex partners is wrong and uncomfortable. For men, it is normal, or even required to express such thoughts as often as possible, to seem more masculine and to gain respect among peers.
This is why this memoir is so brave and unusual. Erica Garza has a tremendous amount of courage for having written and published this book. I'm certain she faced backlash and objectification after the book was released (I even saw a few articles using a sensational tone, calling her a 'nympho' and Goodreads reviews questioning if what she describes indeed happened). But her purpose with the book was to share her experiences with others like her who still suffer silently and feel that they should be ashamed. Writing it all down was also important for her from a therapeutic point of view.
I immensely enjoyed reading this book. The language is simple, straightforward and I found it impossible to put it down. I devoured it in a single day which doesn't happen very often! The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 was the 'traveling to Southeast Asia to find yourself' aspect of the story and the fact that she considers Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love as a book of spiritual guidance.
Getting Off is the story of the author's sex and porn addiction which is almost always considered to be a problem exclusive to men. This is due to the fact that women are conditioned to hide their sexuality and treat it as a taboo subject. Also, the collective obsession with women's 'purity' is another culprit here. It is still a widespread idea that talking about women's desires, their porn watching habits or about them having multiple sex partners is wrong and uncomfortable. For men, it is normal, or even required to express such thoughts as often as possible, to seem more masculine and to gain respect among peers.
This is why this memoir is so brave and unusual. Erica Garza has a tremendous amount of courage for having written and published this book. I'm certain she faced backlash and objectification after the book was released (I even saw a few articles using a sensational tone, calling her a 'nympho' and Goodreads reviews questioning if what she describes indeed happened). But her purpose with the book was to share her experiences with others like her who still suffer silently and feel that they should be ashamed. Writing it all down was also important for her from a therapeutic point of view.
I immensely enjoyed reading this book. The language is simple, straightforward and I found it impossible to put it down. I devoured it in a single day which doesn't happen very often! The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 was the 'traveling to Southeast Asia to find yourself' aspect of the story and the fact that she considers Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love as a book of spiritual guidance.