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People have long tried to give up various vices, habits and proclivities in their attempts toward self-improvement. Coffee? Sure. Television? O.K. But sex? Hold on there. Cambridge-educated journalist Hephzibah Anderson, in an effort to try to untangle and distinguish her desire for love from her desire for sex, chose to go a year without the latter. The author of Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex talks to TIME about how celibacy can be a good thing.
In your dedication you write that your mother should read no further. Has she followed your advice?
She's skimmed it. I know that as soon as she got a hint that a bedroom scene might be approaching, she skipped a few pages. But my favorite response from a family member came from my beloved great aunt, who is now in her 80s. She assures me that she'll read it when she's old enough.
This sexless year was over two years ago, and your book has already been published in the U.K., right?
It was. And also in France as of a month ago, which was fascinating.
Why's that?
Because what would a British woman have to teach French women about femininity and sexuality? But it was interesting because one of the responses that it got in Britain was that it was a little bit unpolitically correct to suggest that men and women want slightly different things from physical intimacy and need slightly different things, whereas the French have never really lost that understanding. So a lot of what I was saying, they weren't surprised by.
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