Losing It
A Novel
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2.8 • 29 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
"Wise and witty... Losing It is cringingly insightful about sex and dating and all the ways we tie ourselves into knots over both." --The New York Times Book Review
A hilarious novel that Maggie Shipstead calls "charming... witty and insightful," about a woman who still has her virginity at the age of twenty-six, and the summer she's determined to lose it—and find herself.
Julia Greenfield has a problem: she's twenty-six years old and she's still a virgin. Sex ought to be easy. People have it all the time! But, without meaning to, she made it through college and into adulthood with her virginity intact. Something's got to change.
To re-route herself from her stalled life, Julia travels to spend the summer with her mysterious aunt Vivienne in North Carolina. It's not long, however, before she unearths a confounding secret—her 58 year old aunt is a virgin too. In the unrelenting heat of the southern summer, Julia becomes fixated on puzzling out what could have lead to Viv's appalling condition, all while trying to avoid the same fate.
For readers of Rainbow Rowell and Maria Semple, and filled with offbeat characters and subtle, wry humor, Losing It is about the primal fear that you just. might. never. meet. anyone. It's about desiring something with the kind of obsessive fervor that almost guarantees you won't get it. It's about the blurry lines between sex and love, and trying to figure out which one you're going for. And it's about the decisions—and non-decisions—we make that can end up shaping a life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this charming second novel from the author of The Patterns of Paper Monsters, a frustrated 26-year-old virgin relocates to Durham, N.C., for a summer in a last ditch effort to lose her virginity. After moving in with her eccentric, spinsterish aunt Viv, Julia Greenfield takes on a menial clerical job at a law firm, where she meets and develops a fast crush on lawyer Elliot. The reader soon gleans what Julia learns only later: Elliot is less available than he seems, Aunt Viv has her own relationship issues, and Julia's taste in men hints that she suffers from a kind of romantic amnesia. These tensions are brought to a predictable but enjoyable climax, in which Julia complicates her relationships with Elliot and Aunt Viv. Deeper than it lets on, the book's distinct delight is the nimble dance its author plays with the somewhat frivolous conceit, embracing its pulpiness to entertain, and pushing it to surprising places.
Customer Reviews
Wasted my money
Mildly entertaining. The blurb I read about this book likened it to Bridget Jones's diary for millennialist which prompted my purchased. Not worth the day and a half I spent reading this.