Author of the week: Sophie Fontanel

last updated 8 January 2015

Even in France, Sophie Fontanel’s sex life rates as cause for an uproar, said Anne Billson in The Telegraph (U.K.). Two summers ago, a media frenzy broke out when the Parisian-born fashion editor revealed in a memoir that she had once willingly kept celibate for 12 years. “I was amazed. People were saying, ‘This is insane, this account,’” says Fontanel, now 50. “They talked to me as though I were some sort of strange animal.” Some commentators speculated that Fontanel was a lesbian, or a religious fanatic. But she also began hearing from other women who’d turned away from sex for long periods. “I had unwittingly touched on an issue that was rarely talked about,” she says. “People just don’t express dissatisfaction with their sex lives.”

Fontanel’s book, recently published here as The Art of Sleeping Alone, makes clear that refraining from sex was a way to reassert control over her life, said Erica Schwiegershausen in NYMag.com. At 27, she simply wasn’t finding her sex life satisfying. “I was doing the things because everyone else was,” she says. Breaking with a longtime boyfriend, she decided then that temporary abstinence could turn out to be renewing. “My real desire was to re-want having sex,” she says. Years later, a man she deemed worth sleeping with did come along, and she doesn’t regret having waited so long. “A lot of women define themselves by their sexuality; in order to have self-esteem, they need to feel desired by men,” she says. “It’s very important to learn that it’s not a sin to be alone.”