I can’t believe it took me this long to get around to blogging about Jane Juska and her two books, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance and Unaccompanied Women: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate, the latter of which I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) about a year or so ago. Ms. Juska, as it turns out, is one of my all-time favorite memoirists and one truly courageous individual.
I hadn’t seen her do any talks or interviews until I looked online to see what I could turn up. There’s not a lot there. I was able to locate three clips, and I’ve included the longest one available, a talk she gave at something called Idea City 2007, which advertises itself as a gathering of “the smartest people” discussing “the biggest ideas.” By the way, though this video is twenty-two minutes long, Juska’s presentation takes up only the first thirteen. I chose this one because the others involve an interlocutor. This one, however, doesn’t, and it seems our author is at her best when she’s allowed to have complete control over the direction things go, which doesn’t surprise me given that she is such a strong-willed and self-directed woman.
I did notice one thing about all the videos I watched. Juska seems a little uncomfortable in front of the camera. Again, I’m not surprised by this. By all accounts of her life, including her own, she lived very quietly and privately until the publication of her first book, which turned her into an overnight celebrity at the age of seventy-one. I wouldn’t be at all shocked to hear her confess that she’s had a hard time adjusting to all the publicity and that she feels a little ill at ease doing televised events.
One of the things I really like about the video I’ve included is that it shows her discussing her days as an English teacher. During that part of her presentation, she says that “most kids are being taught how to write; they are not being taught to write.” The distinction, Juska explains, is that students learn to write when they see their teachers modeling writing, meaning, of course, that teachers should write with their students. As a fellow writing instructor, that’s one I’m going to need to spend some more time thinking about.
Tags: Women's Issues
April 4th, 2010 at 4:40 am
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April 11th, 2010 at 4:26 am
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April 11th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
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