Sexless in the City: A Frigid Evangelical Can't Find Love in the Big Apple

Reviewed: "Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity" by Anna Broadway (Doubleday, 2008)

Timed to coincide with the release of some movie that's supposed to be big, Sexless in the City (Doubleday, 2008) is the debut memoir by a woman writing under the pseudonym of Anna Broadway. It is the story of a 20-something evangelical right-winger from rural Washington and the "men who wander in and out of her life -- but never into her bed."

Only everything the book claims to be, it isn't. The back flap would have you believe that the book is about a small-town girl in the big city. But for the most part, it's the gloomy memories of a small-town girl at a small-town college. When Anna finally does move to New York, about two-thirds of the way into the book, the city has virtually no role in her daily life, with the exception of the occasional subway ride. She could have had these same experiences in Kansas. Nor does this turn out to be a relationship memoir. Broadway has not a single real boyfriend in Sexless -- unless, maybe, you count Jesus.

Anna Broadway has always fancied herself a bit of a rebel: As a child, she develops the dangerous habit of reading teen romance novels. Though at first she gleefully indulges in these forbidden books, even hiding them from her parents to avoid punishment, she soon realizes she's being a very bad little girl when she comes across a scene in which the characters go skinny-dipping. She writes: "Something about that scene disturbed me so much, I wondered if I should stop reading the book right then." Disturbed? Or excited? Granted, the first time a kid gets horny, it can be a little confusing (Mommy, why does my shame-shame feel all warm and tingly?).

Too frightened to ask her parents if what she's doing is wrong, Anna instead sets up an ultimatum: "If God wanted me to stop reading books where people swam naked together, I'd find a hairclip beneath my bed."

Guess what? She finds a hairclip and stops reading. For a while, at least.

Finding God in the form of a hairclip typifies Broadway's crude, primitive religious beliefs. Throughout the book, coincidences are interpreted as messages from God.

When she finds out her plane ride to New Zealand happens to fly over Albuquerque, where one of her crushes annoyingly dubbed "The Winner" lives, it has nothing to do with flight paths. It's yet another message from God, telling Broadway that The Winner is the One. Oddly, God doesn't pass The Winner the same message, because Anna reveals that he blatantly ignores all of her subsequent emails.

When Broadway moves apartments from Astoria to Brooklyn, and boards the N train from Queens for the last time , she sees a homeless man to whom she once gave a squashed, half-eaten muffin (gotta love that right-wing Christian generosity). That's God, too. Although it's not clear what He was trying to say in this case.

Broadway recounts incidences like the amazingly coincidental plane ride and the second coming of the homeless man as though God's influence were self-evident; she doesn't feel the need to explain herself.

Nor does she feel the need to include any context in her story: Incidents that may have felt monumental to her life are sketched with so few specifics that you don't know if she's trying to be coy by withholding information, or if her life is just as boring as it comes across. She claims her virginity is "somewhere between technical and Amish," whatever that means. She ridicules Democrats but won't say outright that she is a Republican. She refers to comments a certain love interest leaves on her blog but won't tell us what they say. It's kind of like listening to a beginner in a language class trying to tell a story: And then I went to this place with this person, and this other person said this thing to someone about this thing, and it was so funny. Ha, ha!