book review:
Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen
I decided to bring along Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen on a recent trip to Costa Rica. I thought the hot weather, endless beaches and non-English speaking population would be a perfect setting to read this sex book since fewer people I would come into contact with could actually read the title and assume I was a major pervert. I also know the true test of whether the book would be worthy of recommendation or not was to take it on a trip and see if it actually came back with me. I quickly became engulfed in Rev Jen’s sex life. As one English-speaking person who sat on the plane with me and asked if she could browse through the memoir quickly observed, “She’s crazy!”
I agree.
Rev Jen is a high sex drive former columnist for nerve.com and Live Nude Elf is a compilation of her “I Did it for Science” columns that includes balloon fetish parties, making a homemade porn video and a Sex and the City endurance test (she is comparable to Carrie Bradshaw in the sense that she is a sex columnist in New York City, all other likenesses end there) to name a few.
It would be impossible (and really dirty) to describe all of the contents and sexual adventures that this book contains. So I will write this: once someone told me he saw a German fetish film where a man stuck his entire head inside a vagina. This book is probably on that same random level of sex and weird entertainment.
Despite Rev Jen being an insane exhibitionist (sex toy Olympian, temporary stripper, founder of the art star scene), I must point out she’s a gifted and insightful writer. Rev Jen’s greatest talent is her self-deprecating humour and vulnerability that makes her a darling of a narrator. At the end of the book, Rev Jen falls in love and must decide whether she can continue writing about her sex life or retire with a chance to live happily ever after with her soul mate. Although my bags were overweight by the end of my trip and I had finished the book, I brought Live Nude Elf back to Canada. I can only hope it gets translated into Spanish. (Erin Kobayashi)
by Reverend Jen Miller, $14.95, 245 pgs, Soft Skull Press, 19 West 21st, Suite 1101, New York NY, 10010, USA