The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost
Written by Robin Rinaldi
Narrated by Kate Udall
4/5
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About this audiobook
What if for just one year you let desire call the shots?The project was simple: Robin Rinaldi, a successful magazine journalist, would move into a San Francisco apartment, join a dating site, and get laid. Never mind that she already owned a beautiful flat a few blocks away, that she was forty-four, or that she was married to a man she'd been in love with for eighteen years. What followed—a year of abandon, heartbreak, and unexpected revelation—is the topic of this riveting memoir, The Wild Oats Project.Monogamous and sexually cautious her entire adult life, Rinaldi never planned on an open marriage—her priority as she approached midlife was to start a family. But when her husband insisted on a vasectomy, something snapped. If I'm not going to have children, she told herself, then I'm going to have lovers. During the week, she would live alone, seduce men (and women), attend erotic workshops, and have wall-banging sex. On the weekends, she would go home and be a wife. Her marriage provided safety and love, but she also needed passion, and she was willing to go outside her marriage to find it.At a time when the bestseller lists are topped by books about eroticism and the shifting roles of women, this brave, brutally honest memoir explores how our sexuality defines us, how it relates to maternal longing, and how we must walk the line between loving others and staying true to ourselves. Like the most searing memoirs, The Wild Oats Project challenges our sensibilities, yielding truths that we all can recognize but that few would dare write down.
Robin Rinaldi
Robin Rinaldi is a journalist and the author of The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost. Her bylines appear in The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Yoga Journal, and elsewhere, and she has been featured on Dr. Oz, The Meredith Vieira Show, Dr. Drew, and BBC Radio.
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Reviews for The Wild Oats Project
6 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Although I couldn't generate much sympathy for her particular position (I haven't the slightest desire for children, and, gee, a wonderful life in San Francisco, amazing career, hunky husband - that sucks!), the story of her explorations was very thought-provoking. As a single person around the same age with some similarly fluid concepts of what relationships do or don't mean, the book rocked my world.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Ive never encountered a stronger visceral reaction of sheer disgust toward a book or story before this memoir.Neither sexuality, nor being a parent, are the quintessence of womanhood or discovering yourself. I've read so many reviews calling this honest or brave. Brave, no. It is not brave to have sex with a dozen lovers to be able to say, "I have lived" on her future death bed, all in response to her husband's vasectomy ending her dream of having children. It is not empowering. Her husband felt blackmailed into the agreement and rules, rules of which she promptly broke (e.g. safe sex out the window). It is nothing short of selfish, misguided, and sad. She states of the many things she learned with this experiment that she owed her ex-husband an apology. Then promptly justifies her position of why she had to do this. She was not contrite in how much hurt she put on her (now) ex-husband, she was justifying both her midlife crisis and reasoning for destroying her marriage. This was a failure on several levels, the biggest of which was thinking she could find herself through sex or motherhood. As a mother and wife, I have had countless conversations with women who discover themselves, myself included, by peeling away the things and labels that people used to define me, to then see to the core of who I was, or they were inside. This is epic soul searching and never once included my identity was defined by sex or husband, partner, children or employment, money in the bank or how good I looked. This memoir is not brave but I will admit, it was honest: burn down whomever gets in the way in her honest and very selfish, narcissistic justification. Sad, but true.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book really left an impression on me. I felt quite sad to finish it.