The Erotic Fire Of The Unattainable: Aphorisms
On Love, Art, & The Vicissitudes Of Life
A most unusual “guide,” The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable reveals what women never really say-- what they feel, what they know, about men, their futures, fame, hunches, talent, the ocean, sex, aging.
What they want to articulate about their own feelings but perhaps never had the courage to admit, even to themselves – and what men have always wanted to grasp. The narrator travels, rebels, has made mistakes, and delves into all the vicissitudes of life intently and intensely.
Written in short aphorisms, the style is poetic in that each pensée is short and provocative, although not oblique or metaphoric as in poetry. Each aphorism flows into the next and enters the soul, rather like a piece of music made of thoughts and feelings, building in one’s head.
Gay Walley follows the inner life of a woman through the narrative of outside events: getting past a divorce to a man she loved, and still loves. A marriage that didn’t last because they were too on fire from their own pasts. Meanwhile, she is involved with another man and not quite sure how he fits inside the puzzle.
She writes about these relationships, her artistic expression: where art is within this commercial culture, and what one must give up and therefore give to make one’s art for it to remain alive. All this is juxtaposed with the vicissitudes of the everyday necessity of making money, existing in the corporate world.
A modern day Margarite Duras, Gay Walley touches on the inner feelings of a woman who loves lightly, writes deeply, and is affected by place, desire, knows the importance of rebellion, inner spirituality and more.
The title springs from the concept that eroticism is tied to living one’s innate truth, not to the person one loves, and that the erotic fire is often in the seeking, the imagination, not in having.
IML Publications decided to publish this gem of a book when the her mother, who has lived a conventional life in Osawatomie, Kansas, declared: “Gay dares to writes for me, for women – things we can never say."
Beginning with “Why Women Fight Pirates” and ending with the narrator’s thoughts on her “Deathbed,” this volume can be reread as a companion to life’s challenges while deepening the geography of one’s soul. The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable is a rare journey into the heart and mind of a fearless woman who chooses to live in and through the edge.
The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable is available on Amazon.com
“I recently reread Gay Walley’s brilliant novel The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable, which is composed entirely of aphorisms that are quietly insightful and incredibly honest. She’s a writer that takes risks, and I admire that, enormously.”
About Gay Walley
Gay Walley was born in London, England and grew up in Montreal, Canada. She moved to the States in 1968. Boston was home until 1986, when she moved to New York City, where she currently lives. She teaches writing and edits while continuing her own writing.
Her debut novel, Strings Attached
(University Press of Mississippi; 1999), was a finalist for the Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Award, as well as the Writer’s Voice Capricorn Award and Paris Book Festival. Its excellent reviews included The New York Times, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist. She is a Zoetrope finalist for a short story, The Naked Maja, and finalist for Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Award for The Debt (a novel she chose not to publish). IML Publications brought out The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable in 2007, which was also a finalist for Paris Book Festival and has been launched at two film festivals as The Unattainable Story. Her play "Love, Genius and a Walk" was nominated for 6 awards in the Midtown Festival in New York 2013 and is scheduled to go off Broadway in 2017. In addition, she has ghostwritten, Batista's Son, the story of Fulgencio Batista, as told by his son, about his father’s terms as President/Dictator and about the family’s exile from Cuba; and Aum Shanti Aum, Memoir of a Black Yogi.
For more on "Love, Genius and a Walk" visit LoveGeniusAndAWalk.com or actor Alexander Pepperman's website.
Strings Attached is available on Amazon.com. Visit GayWalley.com
The Latest Collection of 6 Novels by Jacqueline Gay Walley
Strings Attached
BOOK 1 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION
Re-release from University Press of Mississippi, 1999
In her first novel, Gay Walley weaves into a seamless narrative - a woman’s quest for love, and the drunken, vagabond childhood she endured with her father. Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. When she grows up, she longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and to crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her drought of affection?
To Any Lengths
BOOK 2 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION
The “I” is a woman who is deliberating getting married to her boyfriend and is frightened. Her childhood has made her distrust union. She has a friend who has just gone to jail for growing marijuana. He has been a war hero, an artist, is good looking, a womanizer. She begins to visit him, because he is trapped like she is, and he gives her advice on love and herself. She begins to listen. He is the one who is “free” to her. In listening to him, she begins to itemize her own crimes in love. She marries her boyfriend, out of friendship, but the marriage feels doomed to her because the prisoner’s mind is lodged inside her. She has to come to where she belongs and what is true freedom and true love to her.
Prison Sex
BOOK 3 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION
This is a book about longing and how three people have to break through their respective prisons. David, a man, in actual prison for growing marijuana longs for her and has to deal with being in prison. Peter, her husband, is in the prison of not being loved enough by a wife who is obsessed with freedom. And Mira, the wife, feels that marriage is a prison for her and only being herself will make her free. She creates a situation where they all get to break their binds.
The Bed You Lie In
BOOK 4 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION
This is a story of an anguished love affair between two adult children (Arieh and Mira) of holocaust survivors who cannot get their parents’ pain out of themselves. But his anger, his volatility leads her to a kinder gentler Englishman, Michael. However, she cannot accept his goodness, nor what appears to be a dullness compared to the wildness of Arieh. They become involved in a triangle and the seemingly cuckolded man goes mad and wants to punish the woman with a vengeance that is almost Nazi-ish. She takes it because she feels she deserves it, having been treated badly by her survivor mother, although she doesn’t deserve this kind of rage. But she knows it is born of pain, a pain familiar to her. She knows shet has to confront her past. “’It’s because of me,’ Arieh said, ‘that you don’t want to be alone anymore.’ And maybe that was true. I had had to confront myself with him. The messiness of it, all that need that welled up in me. It had nearly killed me but not sublimating those needs had freed me to be real, to desire.” These two understand each other’s backstory and what has made them impossible in love, till they finally break through and she can purchase a new bed to lie in and live in her truth.
Write, She Said
BOOK 5 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION
The title harkens back to Duras’ novel and film, “Destroy, she said”. Mira, the main character, a writer, has a kind of magical realism experience with these two 20th century writers who come back to life as she steps through a mirrored glass to meet Jean Rhys in a bar and Marguerite Duras on a park bench. With ethereal credit cards they whisk her off to Vienna to heal that Jewish heritage, to teach her about life, love and writing, and to open her to new love with an oboe player. It’s as though they want her to know that love comes and goes, experiment, don’t be afraid, but all the while keep perfecting the craft of the writing, what Walley exudes as, “The private lives of sentences.”
Magnetism
BOOK 6 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION
A woman over sixty wants her sexuality, her eros back. It opens with the main character going on a date alone, walks herself along the High Line in New York, shops for a book at The Strand and goes to hear Mahler. She remembers the past when she had that juiciness, and she finds lovers in the present, but something is amiss. She has a friendship with a female holocaust survivor who lives upstairs, who has that eros, even over 80, just in her being. The older woman dies, but in the lessons she leaves behind, the narrator finally finds that eros within her attitude toward life.
news and UPDATES
IML Publications is proud to announce that Skyhorse Publishers (a division of Time Warner) has purchased Gay Walley's The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable.
With the help of co-producer IML Publications, the book has been adapted into film, The Unattainable Story.