In a culture that clamours with the noisy public narratives of sexual desire, the implacable silence of sexual refusal is the last remaining taboo. At least, that is what the journalist Sophie Fontanel felt when she composed the opening sentence of her bestselling memoir, The Art of Sleeping Alone. “For a long while, and I really don’t wish to say when it was or how many years it lasted, I chose to live in what was perhaps the worst insubordination of our times: I had no sex life,” she wrote.
It is very French, that lofty vagueness about chronology – though not strictly necessary, given that Fontanel, a 50-year-old editor at French Elle magazine, has revealed elsewhere that her period of celibacy lasted for a dozen years, between the ages of 27 and 39. When her memoir was first published in France it caused – predictably, in the country that produced such assiduous libertines as the Marquis de Sade and Dominique Strauss- Kahn – quite a stir, selling 150,000 copies in a few weeks.
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