Thanks for Coming: One Young Woman's Quest for an Orgasm

By Mara Altman

By turns uproarious and touching, the memoir of a young woman's search for an orgasm—and for the elusive connections between sex and love

Twenty-six-year-old Mara Altman wanted to know what all the screaming was about. She'd lost her virginity at seventeen; grown up in southern California with sexually free parents; had lovers in India, Burma, and Peru; and spent a year in Bangkok observing all manner of depravity. And yet she was an attractive, successful, single woman in New York who'd never had an orgasm.

And so she embarked on a wildly funny, emotionally resonant odyssey—a journey both inside and outside herself—only to discover that, for Mara, orgasm was connected to a part of her that no vibrator could reach. Thanks for Coming is one woman's look at our obsession with and anxiety over the female orgasm. Her quest to get her own yields poignant results that will surprise even the sexually awakened among us. From sex shows to sex conventions, from a therapist's couch to her own couch, from the bedroom to the bar, Mara Altman proves to be a guide as hilarious as she is investigative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 14, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061872228

Mara Altman

Mara Altman is the author of Thanks for Coming and Bearded Lady. She writes about issues that embarrass her (i.e. chin hair), because she has found that putting shame on the page diffuses the stigma, leaving her with a sense of empowerment and freedom. She currently resides in San Diego, California.

Reviews for Thanks for Coming

[zura27 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It wasn't my favorite book in the world, but it was really entertaining. Altman has a very easy and funny style which makes the book interesting and fairly comical at times. I thought it was going to have a little more into the science of orgasm, but instead focused more on the emotional. It was informative, but read more like a fiction journey. I think the lightness and the journey aspects of it made it interesting and worth reading. I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a simple, entertaining read.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This comes on like creative-nonfiction camwhoring (I don't like to use that word, but come on, "hot twentysomething in search of her first orgasm"?), but it develops by surprise into an affecting thesis on our human needs, our ability to provide for one another, the limits of that ability, but the inadequacy of going it alone. We are built to take care of each other--so the implicit argument goes--and that's all. And that's what orgasm is--and by extension fulfilling sexuality, and one of the things Altman does really well is represent her struggle to let go of this negative, self-defeating obsession with the goal and just enjoy the experience. Giving each other pleasure, learning how to take pleasure ourselves and give others the pleasure of giving us pleasure. It's all just taking care of each other.

I think the concatenation of weird characters hovering around what I'll, for lack of better term, call the orgasm industry--the sex therapist, the aging pornstar, the "masturbation queen" and her champion the sex mystic--is fun but ephemeral. What lasts from this book is the powerful rendition of the mental blocks, the bugbears in Altman's head throwing her off every time she gets back in the saddle (yes, she is riding block and bugbears, and yes, I support mixed metaphors under all circumstances). the discomfort with the nonchalant, ugly language of modern sex (this I can relate to). The despair as narrative after narrative falls apart, especially her return to Israel to meet a serious, sensual boy and have an earthy Jewish marriage in best rabbinic tradition. Most of all, the inability to relinquish control, to just ride with her body and say "this feels good" until it . . . does.

It makes it really mean something when Altman achieves her goal (which is not when she has her first orgasm; that, of course, is just the beginning). It make you hope she'll remember what she's learned about herself, and become a more loving, more patient, softer partner--and more human, less mechanistic, glorying in every moment. It's a good message.