Part self-help book and part memoir, Action: A Book About Sex sees the former Rookie editor break down sexual barriers and do away with outmoded ‘taboos’
While she was writing her first book, Amy Rose Spiegel regularly abandoned her apartment to install herself in various hotels and motels around New York City, including a dive in Queens overlooking the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, and a Rockaway Beach locale where she was handed a joint on entry. Action: A Book About Sex, feels as though it could have been written in an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane, the bohemian residence at the heart of Armistead Maupin’s cult queer series Tales Of The City.
A former editor at Rookie Magazine, 25-year-old Spiegel is a literary stylist whose writing betrays an infectious sense of life’s possibilities: “Gilding the kingdom of your brain will help you establish a ‘sex life’ by building, first, a multilayered ‘life’, no modifiers,” she declares, in a book that has little in common with The Joy Of Sex’s fleshy morass. She’ll use Latin epithets to discuss rim jobs, and a combination of Federico García Lorca’s poetry and the McDonald’s menu to talk about flirting. There’s a magnetic groove to her tone that feels straight out of Maupin’s 1970s, but Action is a sex book for 21st-century sexual politics, and the first written for a generation for whom gender and sexual fluidity are a matter of course rather than a curio.
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