By Rachel Resnick
Bloomsbury, £7.99
When Hollywood types began seeking treatment for sex addiction in the 1990s, cynical Brits dismissed it as a “condition” cooked up by serial adulterers who needed a clinical alibi to get off the hook. But it seems we were wrong.
Now there is not only a 12-step recovery programme for sexaholics (derived from Alcoholics Anonymous) but, according to psychology experts, two million people in the UK will experience sex addiction at some point in their lives. Of that group, 87 per cent will come from troubled families and, usually, at least one other family member will have an addiction.
Rachel Resnick’s memoir puts these unpalatable statistics into an almost tragic context, for the American author is a self-confessed sexaholic, now committed to the recovery programme.
She grew up in what has to be one of the contemporary book world’s most dysfunctional families. The ticking of the tawdry boxes is complete once we learn that Resnick’s mother, a disinherited debutante, was an alcoholic who cruised bars for unsuitable men with her 11-year-old daughter in tow while her three-year-old son was home alone.
Resnick’s childhood is so tainted by neglect and emotional abuse that were she to lie on a psychiatrist’s couch it is unlikely she would ever get up again. But she shunned the couch and opted for the pen, or rather the cathartic keyboard to relate “my journey through a lifelong pattern of ruinous relationships with men, a pattern that may have cost me my chance to have a child, or a healthy relationship of any kind”.
Born in Jerusalem to a Jewish father and the aforementioned, dipsomaniac, Catholic mother, Resnick’s memoir switches back and forth between her present, sexually driven love life, involving a dastardly line-up of misogynistic “artists”, and her terrible childhood, spent between cities in America.
When her mother lost custody of Rachel, then aged 12, she moved in with her weak, ineffectual, father, Henry, and ultra-Orthodox stepmother, Batsheva.
It was a short stay; Batsheva wrongly accused father and daughter of incest, and Rachel was sent to boarding schools, then neighbours and finally complete strangers. Is it any wonder that this girl grew up hungry for affection of any kind.
Jewish readers will surely be particularly distressed by the father’s lack of feeling and compassion for his own child and it is a testament to Resnick’s extraordinary strength of character that, in later years, she agreed to join him on a trip to Israel, her birth-place.
Sadly, the holiday served only to highlight her father’s selfish, uncaring nature. While visiting a kibbutz, he is asked: “You are on a bus with your child and terrorists board. You can save your child or yourself. Not both. Which would you choose?” His answer confirmed what Rachel already knew.
This is not a tale for the emotionally squeamish. Resnick exposes every inch of her damaged self and the dreadful treatment she received from men whom most women would seek to avoid. Desperate for commitment and impervious to rejection, she was addicted not only to love, but also to sending streams of poetic emails to her charmless lovers. “Stop!” you want to shout, but she has already pressed the send button.
Reading her book is sometimes like driving past a car crash. You know you should not look but you can’t help yourself. Ultimately, however, you’ll just want to give the young Rachel a reassuring hug.
