A sex addict’s recovery
Published 9:26 am Friday, May 30, 2008
Despite the seductive woman posing on the book jacket, Sue William Silverman’s “Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction” (paperback $13.95) isn’t about sex. It’s about recovery.
Silverman’s memoir begins at her low point, her weekly hotel room meeting with a married man named Rick. For years she has led a double life: a normal housewife and a woman secretly driven to empty sex with men other than her husband. She feels needed and validated by men’s attention.
Her therapist tells her she needs to check into an inpatient addiction recovery center, that her addiction to mind-numbing sex is killing her. Her 27-day hospital stay and her subsequent recovery forms the framework for her to explore her obsessive thoughts, self-loathing and the incest that set her on this path. Don’t expect titillating sex scenes.
The writing is thoughtful, revealing and honest. Anyone with addictive tendencies, whatever the drug of choice, will probably relate.
