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recently, I read her 2001 memoir about her middle-aged sexual dysfunction, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, and while not as daring as the earlier book it still made for a quick and rather delightful read. It is novella length, at most, and chronicles Kaysen’s 1990s bout with sexual dysfunction, brought about by the effects of a nakedpornstars long ago operation to remove a cyst from her vulva. Now, in the hands of nakedpornstars a typical feminist, save Camille Paglia, the book would have been awash in self pity or veered off into a power nakedpornstars tirade that somehow blamed ten thousand years of patriarchal oppression for her twat’s ache. Fortunately, while Kaysen is not in sync with Paglia, she does have considerable truck with feminist writer and critic Daphne Merkin, of The New Yorker fame. Both women know how to laugh at themselves, although Kaysen is probably the more literarily minded of the two. Over the course of a few years, as she is menopausing, Kaysen finds that her vagina is constantly in pain from vestibulitis, as if ‘a little dentist drilling a little hole’, and she is forced by circumstance and her own stupidity, to go to series of incompetent doctors, herbalists, and biofeedbackists, that can do nothing to ease her pain.
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