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allyhercka 's review for:
"We're still entirely alone."
Okay! I'm gonna get two things out of the way really quickly so I can focus on my love for this book after I do:
1. This is not a work of fiction. I see too many reviews from people who are disappointed in it not being very similar to the show, and this is in no way to discredit them, but... don't expect a gripping tale of two people who breathe dramatically and talk in slogans and which does not deviate from their story - it's a biography. It goes off on tangents, it talks about more than just their personal relationship, so expect that.
2. Man, oh man, were there a lot of adverbs. If that sounds like something that won't bother you too much when reading, that's great - you're gonna fall in love with the language in this book, but after a while, to me, it got so irritating. It genuinely felt like Maier wrote with the thesaurus open at all times, which is never a good idea. I don't care what kind of book it is. Stop with the adverbs. And the elevated language for no other reason than to have elevated language. It does nothing for the work.
Alright, if you can call my love for Masters and Gini Johnson a kind of bias, you're free to do that, but I fell in love with this book extremely early on - this is most definitely not gonna be the last I read about these two, because they're the most wonderfully interesting people about whom I've read for a long, long time. And Maier did a masterful job - pun intended - of directing the book in the same direction of their lives - he starts with Virginia alone, independent, doing her own thing and slowly transitions into her connection to Masters; from then on, it's about them as an entity, because I'll dare go as far as to say they never really broke apart after their first meeting, and the name 'Johnson' is hardly ever mentioned without 'Masters' to accompany it. It rose so realistically - the book did - along with their ascension to fame.
Maier took small breaks from that to focus on their findings, though - a lot of the biography is a depiction of the American society then and how deeply narrow-minded they were about sex. He writes about the times when people actually dismissed scientific - or rather, biological - findings because it took away from the magic of 'making love' and made it a less human experience. He writes about how Masters and Johnson took offense to that and continued to elucidate the mysteries of sex without being deterred by potential criticism for being vulgar, which they did get. And ignored.
Of these little tangents, I'll say my favorite was the way he went through that wave of feminism which dominated America after Masters and Johnson's first book came out and made it clear, once and for all, that Freud didn't know what he was talking about - men were not sexually superior to women and, even more to the point, women could live completely independently of men in a sexual way. That kind of feminism - I'll subscribe to any day. Maier stayed objective throughout, for which I'll say kudos, but that description of how people finally realized there was nothing sexually superior to men and loved that the revelation came from a male/female team was the most involved I read him in the entire book.
Except, maybe, for the last couple of chapters, which killed me in all kinds of ways. The stoic nature of Bill Masters - his I-tolerate-people-and-that's-it attitude towards life in general, his hard look and rough air of authority - and the social nature of Virginia Johnson - her love of fame, willingness to speak freely about her work and general charisma - came to an end before the end of their lives. Bill, I choose to believe, acted differently because of the dementia and Gini, due to solitude - loneliness. They broke apart in a way that wasn't as satisfying as your typical drama - there was no closure. It didn't feel final, when the public were notified that Masters and Johnson were divorcing, it felt more like a betrayal. And that's exactly how Maier tells it - there's very little detail of their lives, of those we were aware of, that isn't in the book. I'll say it's a very complete compilation.
I'll end with a quote people like to mention a lot after reading the book, in which neither Virginia nor Bill were ever portrayed as two people in love - on the contrary: both of them rejected the idea, at least in relation to each other, that love was a possibility. They didn't even know what love was.
Maier remembers:
"I suggested she was still in love. For the first time, her tone sounded different.
'I guess so,' she said, wistfully."
Okay! I'm gonna get two things out of the way really quickly so I can focus on my love for this book after I do:
1. This is not a work of fiction. I see too many reviews from people who are disappointed in it not being very similar to the show, and this is in no way to discredit them, but... don't expect a gripping tale of two people who breathe dramatically and talk in slogans and which does not deviate from their story - it's a biography. It goes off on tangents, it talks about more than just their personal relationship, so expect that.
2. Man, oh man, were there a lot of adverbs. If that sounds like something that won't bother you too much when reading, that's great - you're gonna fall in love with the language in this book, but after a while, to me, it got so irritating. It genuinely felt like Maier wrote with the thesaurus open at all times, which is never a good idea. I don't care what kind of book it is. Stop with the adverbs. And the elevated language for no other reason than to have elevated language. It does nothing for the work.
Alright, if you can call my love for Masters and Gini Johnson a kind of bias, you're free to do that, but I fell in love with this book extremely early on - this is most definitely not gonna be the last I read about these two, because they're the most wonderfully interesting people about whom I've read for a long, long time. And Maier did a masterful job - pun intended - of directing the book in the same direction of their lives - he starts with Virginia alone, independent, doing her own thing and slowly transitions into her connection to Masters; from then on, it's about them as an entity, because I'll dare go as far as to say they never really broke apart after their first meeting, and the name 'Johnson' is hardly ever mentioned without 'Masters' to accompany it. It rose so realistically - the book did - along with their ascension to fame.
Maier took small breaks from that to focus on their findings, though - a lot of the biography is a depiction of the American society then and how deeply narrow-minded they were about sex. He writes about the times when people actually dismissed scientific - or rather, biological - findings because it took away from the magic of 'making love' and made it a less human experience. He writes about how Masters and Johnson took offense to that and continued to elucidate the mysteries of sex without being deterred by potential criticism for being vulgar, which they did get. And ignored.
Of these little tangents, I'll say my favorite was the way he went through that wave of feminism which dominated America after Masters and Johnson's first book came out and made it clear, once and for all, that Freud didn't know what he was talking about - men were not sexually superior to women and, even more to the point, women could live completely independently of men in a sexual way. That kind of feminism - I'll subscribe to any day. Maier stayed objective throughout, for which I'll say kudos, but that description of how people finally realized there was nothing sexually superior to men and loved that the revelation came from a male/female team was the most involved I read him in the entire book.
Except, maybe, for the last couple of chapters, which killed me in all kinds of ways. The stoic nature of Bill Masters - his I-tolerate-people-and-that's-it attitude towards life in general, his hard look and rough air of authority - and the social nature of Virginia Johnson - her love of fame, willingness to speak freely about her work and general charisma - came to an end before the end of their lives. Bill, I choose to believe, acted differently because of the dementia and Gini, due to solitude - loneliness. They broke apart in a way that wasn't as satisfying as your typical drama - there was no closure. It didn't feel final, when the public were notified that Masters and Johnson were divorcing, it felt more like a betrayal. And that's exactly how Maier tells it - there's very little detail of their lives, of those we were aware of, that isn't in the book. I'll say it's a very complete compilation.
I'll end with a quote people like to mention a lot after reading the book, in which neither Virginia nor Bill were ever portrayed as two people in love - on the contrary: both of them rejected the idea, at least in relation to each other, that love was a possibility. They didn't even know what love was.
Maier remembers:
"I suggested she was still in love. For the first time, her tone sounded different.
'I guess so,' she said, wistfully."