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Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

by Susie Bright (Goodreads Author)

3.5 of 5 stars 3.50 · rating details · 193 ratings · 49 reviews

Ever wondered why there’s no female voice as bold, erotic, unflinching, and revealing as Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, or Philip Roth? There is. It belongs to Susie Bright.

In this stunning and courageous coming-of-age story, Susie Bright opens her heart and her life. From fearful Irish Catholic Girl Scout to gun-toting teenage revolutionary—and finally the "The Avatar of Am...more

Hardcover, 328 pages

Published March 22nd 2011 by Seal Press (first published January 1st 2011)

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Jul 05, 2011 Andreea Daia rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, ab, first-reads, read-2011

******Full Disclosure**** This was an ARC copy, that was received through the GoodReads Advance program. I am grateful for the chance to have listened this memoir, which I might not have purchased otherwise.
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I am going back and forth about this review - I think I wrote it three times so far, but it still hadn't capture all the nuances of the book. First, let me tell you that I had no idea who Susie Bright was before listening to this book. I have very mixed feelings about this memoir partic...more ******Full Disclosure**** This was an ARC copy, that was received through the GoodReads Advance program. I am grateful for the chance to have listened this memoir, which I might not have purchased otherwise.
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I am going back and forth about this review - I think I wrote it three times so far, but it still hadn't capture all the nuances of the book. First, let me tell you that I had no idea who Susie Bright was before listening to this book. I have very mixed feelings about this memoir particularly because it is a memoir and, by definition, it is not a story with which I have to identify myself, or which I have to "enjoy," but a mirror that reflects back to the reader someone else's life.

The story is partitioned into three sections, childhood, young adult, and adult. The first section is disturbing in its honesty about the mother's mental issues. However it holds your interest and it offers a good background about the author's childhood scene.

It is the second part that brought up all those mixed feelings. Indeed, not only that I can't identify myself with the two major views that characterize this section. I pretty much don't agree with the author's views, neither on 1) politics, nor on 2) sexuality (at least the opinion that sex with every and any person who crosses your path is a good/liberating thing).

Yet, it is because of these diametral opposed ways of thinking that made listening to Susie Bright's views, particularly interesting. What goes through the minds of those who look at communism through pink-coated glasses? Who are they? What is their social and intellectual background? Then of course, how can a woman jump from a partner to another and not commit emotional suicide? It is my personal belief that, by default, women are hard-wired for an emotional-fulfilling life; so how can some of them find comfort in a life lacking personal involvement?

I realize that this is a very personal point-of-view, but to me, the purpose of this section was answering those questions.

As far as the style of this section is concerned, at times, I found the story very unfocused, jumping from an aspect of her life to something completely different and, to me, unrelated. There were also some bits and pieces which I wasn't sure that brought anything to the overall story: memories about people whom the author neither met nor defined her, memories which didn't even draw a better picture of a certain generation. The example that comes to my mind is the story about the dead girlfriend of the guy whose house she used to clean.

The most interesting part for me was by far the third section. Listening to the description of the author's problems in order to publish On Our Backs, a magazine for gay women, was enlightening, disturbing, even scary to some extent. In a world dominated by overly conservative people, bringing to life a lesbian magazine proved to be a hell paved with threats (going as far as bomb threats) and little to no rewards (even coming form the gay community). My heart went to those women who were hurting no one, just trying to express who they were, to leave their mark in this world.

The issue that turned me off about this section (and dropped my rating to only 3 stars) was the author's patronizing view that, as long as you're a straight woman, you're never going to understand the bliss of open sex. Coming from a person who fought her entire life for liberating the women, this if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us attitude is a little bit immature in my opinion. Because in the end in order to fulfill your life (emotionally and sexually) what matters most is to find the right person; the gender of that person is utterly irrelevant...(less)

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Mar 04, 2013 Brent Dyer rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm a big Susie Bright fan to begin with, so my "meh" review of this book is surprising (at least for me).

For someone who has a famously diverse and adventurous sex life, and who is know for talking about sex, the book actually has very little sex.

Mostly, it's about her work in labor organizing and, later, in the realm of sex-positive feminism. All of that stuff is good, even great, but it was much less than I was hoping for.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that there wasn't enough explic...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Misty Fowler rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: ebooks

Susie Bright did a wonderful job telling her story in this memoir. Sometimes my jaw dropped, many times I got chills from identifying with her, and other times I almost wept with joy at her openness. I'd recommend this book to what I consider "modern feminists", although I think the feminists who began the movement would be shocked and appalled at many things she admits to, here. I don't think she writes with the purpose of shocking anyone, but with a story like hers, it cannot be helped.

I imagi...more

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Sep 20, 2012 Spotsalots added it

Shelves: memoir

I'd been meaning to read this for awhile. I often feel as though Susie Bright and I were separated at birth in some parallel universe, given the rather uncanny number of things we have in common while we simultaneously have, naturally, many differences.

The book definitely held my interest. It's in three main sections--one relating to childhood, one about the teen years, and one about getting involved with Good Vibrations and On Our Backs. I wasn't expecting so much childhood trauma--the suicidal...more I'd been meaning to read this for awhile. I often feel as though Susie Bright and I were separated at birth in some parallel universe, given the rather uncanny number of things we have in common while we simultaneously have, naturally, many differences.

The book definitely held my interest. It's in three main sections--one relating to childhood, one about the teen years, and one about getting involved with Good Vibrations and On Our Backs. I wasn't expecting so much childhood trauma--the suicidal, nearly murderous mother was a surprise. I had assumed Susie was always a more sophisticated child than I was, but no, she was struggling to be unobtrusive. It was her move to her father's custody that both gave her freedom to maneuver and set her in a social milieu filled with people and experiences way beyond what I was encountering an hour's drive to the east. My mother obsessively worried that I'd find myself in the kind of situations Susie did; however, in Orange County I led a fairly sheltered life. I found little in the way of sex, drugs, or leftist politics there, although I did help found my high school's alternative newspaper, and in so doing looked at issues of Susie's Red Tide.

I was fascinated by her experience attempting to do socialist organizing with the Teamsters as part of an underground cell. Here I felt the book suffered from focus on major highlights; there wasn't enough on how she met up with the group and how her relationship with it developed. Likewise, earlier on, I felt there wasn't really enough detail about how she leapt from being a naive pubescent outsider to a teenager who was simultaneously bisexually active and a politically engaged. The third section seemed the most satisfactory in terms of telling a story; while much was omitted, it hung together and didn't leave me wondering how she changed. Admittedly, the third part was also more familiar to me in that I too was in the Bay Area and (for awhile) working on an erotic magazine.

Overall, while I wanted parts of the book to be better fleshed out, overall it was well worth reading.(less)

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May 19, 2012 Jan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Full Disclosure: I am one of Susie Bright's thousands of Facebook friends, though we have never met. Our books are both finalists for the same award: for Bisexual Nonfiction in the 2012 Lambda Literary Awards. Susie's book fits the category better, and even though I prefer fiction to nonfiction, I loved every second of this memoir. The style is bold, funny and utterly captivating, as I imagine Susie must be in person. I was a huge fan to start with, and this book had me collapsing in giggles at...more Full Disclosure: I am one of Susie Bright's thousands of Facebook friends, though we have never met. Our books are both finalists for the same award: for Bisexual Nonfiction in the 2012 Lambda Literary Awards. Susie's book fits the category better, and even though I prefer fiction to nonfiction, I loved every second of this memoir. The style is bold, funny and utterly captivating, as I imagine Susie must be in person. I was a huge fan to start with, and this book had me collapsing in giggles at the kitchen table as I read.

The course of Susie's life is in some ways close to my own. We both grew up in Southern California, and she's only four years older than I am. In fact, she was working in a copy shop in Santa Monica while I was still in high school there. We're both writers and bisexual pioneers, though she pioneered in a much bigger way. My mother wasn't as difficult as hers, though we had our conflicts, and my parents stayed together while hers divorced, something that was less common then than now. So in addition to the heartbreak of losing contact with one parent while the other struggled, Susie had to deal with the stigma of coming from what was then called "a broken home."

I come from an upper middle class background, a place of privilege that Susie never knew. My parents were also a lot more involved and controlling than Susie's. It took me a lot longer to break away from their expectations. I had Susie's smarts but not her daring. We both dropped out of high school and took the G.E.D. (Graduate Equivalence Degree) exam, but while I went to Harvard as a double legacy, Susie up and joined a socialist organizing cell.

Since I grew up in Santa Monica, her references to landmarks like the Pussycat Theater, the only porn theater in town we all knew about, and to Uni High, where my mother went to school, kept me asking myself "How different would my life have been if I had Susie's strength of character as a teenager?" It's impossible to know how much was nature and how much nurture, but I'm pretty sure that Susie would have been her own beautiful creation no matter who had raised her or how.

When Susie moves to San Francisco, she reels off a list of people she knew there -- many of whom I know personally or have heard perform live in intimate local venues. She mentions the writing of books by her or her friends that are staple references in my home. She even mentions Danielle Willis, another author from the old Babarian crowd who is published by my publisher, Zeitgeist Press. I feel like we're leading parallel lives.

When it comes to punchy, roll-on-the-floor-laughing prose, though, no one beats Susie in my book. So if you're queer, Californian, of a certain age, a sexual pioneer, a writer, any variety of far left-wing sympathizer, or simply have a great sense of humor or avid curiosity, this book is for you. I couldn't recommend it more highly. (less)

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Jun 15, 2011 Butterfly du Jour rated it 5 of 5 stars

Fragments of stories weave in and out of my thoughts after reading Susie Bright’s memoir, Big Sex Little Death. Stories that Susie experienced, with guts, audacity, and sexual independence.

She begins with her family and by no means is she excusing them. They are necessary for her tale to be told. Beginning where she herself began, from the lives and union of two complicated people—- her parents. Perhaps the raw emotions and scars are still too palpable to fully express her feelings about her par...more

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May 12, 2011 T.L. Cooper rated it 3 of 5 stars

Susie Bright tells her life story in the memoir, Big Sex Little Death. Big Sex Little Death details the events of Bright’s life well but provides very little insight into the motivation behind her actions. Often it reads as if Brigh just became involved in whatever cause happened to come her way. Even her passion for her causes seems muted and a bit fleeting throughout the book. The book is written to leave the impression of a girl longing to belong but never actually explores this with any emot...more

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Mar 22, 2011 Fred Moramarco rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've admired Susie Bright's candid, direct, and wide open sexual expression for a great many years, from her early writing in the lesbian tabloid "On Our Backs" right through to her current blog [...]. Here is a woman who took on a number of risky and controversial causes, especially the celebration of a bawdy and earthy female bisexuality with a primarily lesbian identity, against the anti-sex prophets of what I would call the right wing of the feminist movement--people like Andrea Dworkin and...more I've admired Susie Bright's candid, direct, and wide open sexual expression for a great many years, from her early writing in the lesbian tabloid "On Our Backs" right through to her current blog [...]. Here is a woman who took on a number of risky and controversial causes, especially the celebration of a bawdy and earthy female bisexuality with a primarily lesbian identity, against the anti-sex prophets of what I would call the right wing of the feminist movement--people like Andrea Dworkin and Katherine McKinnon and much of the male-bashing academic feminist establishment. Dworkin, who died in 2005, once argued that heterosexual intercourse itself was a form of rape.

I'm also one of her thousands of Facebook friends and regard her site as one of the best portals to the good things going on on the internet--politically, socially, and erotically. Like me she regards most internet pornography as tediously bad and knows how to distinguish between honesty and in-authenticity in sexuality better than anyone that I know. As a long time editor of "The Best American Erotica" and many other collections of sexually-oriented writing, she also knows how to distinguish between good imaginative writing and porno hack jobs.

She has now published a memoir called "Big Sex, Little Death," and it is a revelation, because it goes beyond the persona created in her erotica and gives us a detailed portrait of the cerebral, radical, flesh and blood person she is and where the components that make up her identity come from.

Susie Bright, the name is perfect for her--kind of oozing intelligence and light--is the only child of Elizabeth Halloran and William Bright, born in Arlington, Virginia in the late 1950's. Her parents were academics and separated shortly after her birth, then divorced. She remembers a high school English teacher who attributed her "out of line" behavior to the fact that she was the product of a broken home. In the years since, a "broken home" has become more the norm than the exception, and the phrase itself seems as antiquated as eight track cassettes. Nonetheless, she was deeply affected by her parents' divorce, especially by her mother's erratic and isolated ways. She describes a horrific event early along when her mother drove her to the edge of the iced-over Saskatchewan River after the twelve-year old Susie had lost her glasses and was told by her mom, "you won't need them in the bottom of the river," and then when the confused child asked where they were going responded "I'm driving us into the river."

It's no wonder that Bright writes "If you were to ask me what the happiest days of my life were, I would say the day that my daughter was born...and the first week I spent reunited with my dad." This happened when she was in her early teens and her mother had asked her father to take care of her permanently. Living with her father was liberating. Both her sex life and her political life began at the tender age of fourteen; she tells us casually on page 85 that after she became involved with a socialist high school paper appropriately called The Red Tide, "I also started having sex. Not with anyone at school, but with the socialists, the ones with all the ideas in their heads." Her political and sexual identities were formed early and have been sustained in unison ever since.

"Big Sex, Little Death" is divided into three sections--the first dealing with her childhood, the second with her adolescence, and the third with all of her adulthood. This gives the book a bit of a skewered feel. Two thirds of the volume deals with a bit more than one third of her life, while the last third of it covers some thirty-three years. (Bright turns 53 this year). This may be because the last third covers the Susie Bright we generally know about--one of the founders of "On Our Backs" and the editor or author of a shelf-full of erotic writings. She was "present at the creation" of a new kind of feminist-based sensuality and a witness to the San Francisco-based sexual turmoil of the 80s and 90s. She chronicles both the AIDS epidemic and the sexual revolution in some detail, and the devastation that both left in their wake. We know a great deal about the former, but less about the latter, and it's surprising to encounter the litany of deaths and suicides associated with the young women who worked in San Francisco sex clubs (p. 243) as well of being reminded of the fratricide committed by Jim Mitchell, one of the famous Mitchell Brothers who ran the notorious O'Farrell Theater in the 70's and 80's and produced porno films including "Beyond the Green Door," which was one of the biggest porno-pop hits of the period.

The only thing we don't get to find out too much about is her long-term relationship with the man in her life (Jon) and particular details about her interactions with her daughter Aretha, now a young woman. Yes, she does offer some good advice about parenthood: "Don't hit them. Don't lie to them. Respect their privacy and your own," but there's little more. Well, I certainly respect her right to privacy in these areas, but many of her readers might like to know about how it was for Aretha growing up with such a sexually explicit mom, and whether her ongoing connection with a man in her life has made her monogamous, or if their relationship is an open one. These seem important omissions for a woman who has made most of her life an open book, but I'm sure there are more than a few pages yet uncut.

Nonetheless, the best thing about Susie Bright's writing is the clarity and vividness of her style as well as it's very personal tone. She has the gift of writing as if she's sitting across a table from you and talking with you casually, even about outrageous things like her mother's threatening to kill her and commit suicide and having threesomes at age fifteen with her girlfriend Danielle, age fourteen, with a series of "older men." Listen: "I felt safe and bold with Danielle--I'd do things with her I'd never do by myself. We could seduce anyone; we could get out of--or into--any situation that we wished. When we were alone she told me that my kissing was terrible, that Americans didn't know how to kiss. She ran a bath for us, and when we got into the tub to practice, we turned on the shower, too, the water pouring down our heads....Men were intimidated by us, which we thought was funny. Funny, but great leverage. For the first couple of months of my sex life, I was too intimidated to do anything alone with a guy--Danielle was my big dog, my fearless leader, the one I could temper and reason with. I loved her. Sex with her, alone, made me shiver. We never talked about it." I quote this at length to give you a sense of the flavor of Bright's precise, talkative, and unadorned prose. Simple declarative sentences, precise detail, and secretive matters you feel like she is sharing just with you. Of course she isn't, but that's the illusion created by this kind of exactitude. This is unquestionably Bright's best and most important book.
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May 21, 2013 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Susie Bright is underappreciated. She's not just a sex writer. She's a writer.

She has a philosophy of sex that's all of a piece with her philosophy of life -- *be human.* Don't try for shrink-wrapped perfection, be it physical or ideological. Acknowledge the complexity of the human experience. Take seriously the vastness and weirdness of love. And be a goddamn adult.

This is a hilarious and moving memoir. And now I understand better where she came from. How all that tenderness and indulgence and...more

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Jul 11, 2012 Kirsten rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

This woman is amazing and this memoir should become a feminist classic. Susie Bright, best known to me for her role as a purveyor of the 90s sex-positive movement, has lived an iconoclastic life seemingly lacking in fear. She never seemed to question who she was (no "coming out" story, no complications with her sexuality) or if she were fighting the just-fight, she just barreled forward. From her teenage days as a socialist organizer to her later days as a pro-sex activist and professor, this me...more

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Jun 09, 2011 Holly rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: audio, 2011-reads

Susie Bright is someone I admire greatly: sex-positive feminist, progressive leftist social activist, lesbian/bi-sexual pioneer. She is smart as hell, extremely learned, and funny. A great audiobook, mostly because it is read by the author herself - she laughs at her own jokes - but I suspect there is more to tell. This book touches parts of her life and career, her parents and early years, her socialist period, and the "On Our Backs" years. I found myself moved by her chill-inducing description...more

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Aug 29, 2012 Robin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, politics, womens

Political and sexual revolutionary Susie Bright’s autobiography is outrageous and funny, with a few sad insights into circumstances that made her who she is. Written in a witty, stream-of-consciousness style, she pulls no punches when talking about her family, her politically radical teen years, her sexual adventures, and her peepshow performer friends with whom she put together the first female-oriented erotic magazine.

Though it’s not erotically written, there’s plenty of language that you mig...more

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May 21, 2011 Caitlin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, abandoned

As a person who came of age during the roaring '70's only to enter college and adulthood for the early years of HIV, I've always admired Susie Bright. She's been a sex-positive educator throughout her career - openly gay, an editor of annual collections of erotic stories. She founded On Our Backs, the first magazine for gay women. She was the first female critic of the X-Rated Critics Organization and wrote feminist reviews of erotic films for the Penthouse Forum. She sassy and funny and was a b...more

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Jul 30, 2012 Jennie rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: autobiography, sex-and-gender-books, womens-studies-books

Within the first 10 pages Susie had done 3 things that annoyed me: 1. She claimed that there are no good memoirs out there by female authors that aren't about dieting. I can think of plenty of female penned autobiographies that have completely knocked my socks off. How about these titles: Lit, The Chronology of Water, The Surrender, Wild, Fun Home, Why Be Normal When You Could Be Happy, Just Kids, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? Give me a break Susie. 2. She refers to her parents by their f...more

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Nov 18, 2012 Jennie rated it 2 of 5 stars

I have read other things about Susie Bright so I was excited to read this book and also because I love memoirs.

This book is boring. Seriously - Susie Bright's wikipedia page is more interesting than this book. The bare events of Susie's life are unusual and interesting, but the way this book is written will make you want to claw out your eyes. It took me over a week to read this book simply because it did not hold my interest - the editing is also shoddy.

I was very disappointed with this especia...more

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Jul 10, 2011 Eric Stone rated it 2 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like this book a lot better than I did. I've liked a lot of other things written by Susie Bright, I have a whole lot of respect and admiration for her, and we went to the same high school - though she started there four years after I graduated - and she even mentions some teachers in the book who I recall. But I was surprised by the lack of emotional resonance in the book. It seemed more like a recitation of incidents than anything much deeper than that and so I was disappoint...more

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Feb 13, 2013 sendann rated it 4 of 5 stars

Powerful, and I was not familiar with Susie Bright, other than having seen Chasing Amy and heard that the main character had been loosely based on someone from somewhere at some time. Anyway, this memoir is wonderful even without context, particularly her memories and reflections about her time with her rather scattered, less than stable mother. Also a lot of interesting insight about the rise of gay cultural cache in the Bay Area, and the odd, hideous world of leftist activism. I read it when I...more

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Aug 21, 2011 Editrix (Amy Lewis) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Much as I admire Susie Bright and have enjoyed her writing in the past, her memoir left me tepid. I'd expected a far more engaging read from someone so brave and expressive. Perhaps the episodes from her adolescence and early adulthood she breezily recounts were more cohesive in her head than they wound up becoming on the page.

Her story might be better told by another person -- someone with a little critical distance who could describe Bright's life and work in the context of the larger feminis...more

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Jan 05, 2012 Hazel rated it 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up because of its intriguing title, and in complete ignorance of Bright's history in North American sexual politics. Unfortunately, she is not a good enough writer to engage a stranger like me and although she's clearly led a colourful life and has known many remarkable people, she could not bring most of them to life for me. In fact the book gives little or no sense of Bright herself as a person, or (except for the early chapters describing life with her unstable mother) of the pe...more

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Jun 01, 2012 Cheryl rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ebooks, memoir

I want to start by warning potential readers: this book contains raw, graphic and radical descriptions and discussions about sex and sexuality. Maybe you picked that up from the title, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir; maybe you are familiar with Susie Bright from her anthologies of erotica or her road shows about sexuality, pornography, and erotica. If you're a fan of her frankness, this book will not disappoint!

Susie Bright is a radical in every possible definition of the word. I knew about her...more

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Mar 26, 2011 Rachel Bussel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Big Sex Little Death is about some of the things you would expect from a Susie Bright memoir: her time at pioneering lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs, the feminist sex wars, politics and hypocrisy. But it's also about a lot of things you might not expect, things that revealed not just how she got to where she is now and the forces that shaped her, but the rift her parents' divorce caused inside her, and how it shaped her as a parent and person.

Bright starts off as a little girl trying to absorb...more Big Sex Little Death is about some of the things you would expect from a Susie Bright memoir: her time at pioneering lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs, the feminist sex wars, politics and hypocrisy. But it's also about a lot of things you might not expect, things that revealed not just how she got to where she is now and the forces that shaped her, but the rift her parents' divorce caused inside her, and how it shaped her as a parent and person.

Bright starts off as a little girl trying to absorb what she can about her family, and to tolerate the wild mood swings her mother has, often with Bright as the object of her derision. It's almost easy to forget that she was ever that little girl when she so boldly takes on the status quo as a high school student with the newspaper The Red Tide. But Bright's vision is set on being part of real socialist organizing, and she drops out of school, argues her way into the IS, raises the money to get there by housecleaning and is even willing to stay after almost being beaten to death and facing extremely dangerous situations. To her the cause stands paramount, yet she is always questioning and observing those around her. There are moments that make one pause and think, "This happened in America?" Even for those of us who aren't under the illusion that the US is perfect, those are hard moments, but Bright manages to write about them, such as the racism at her department store job, with an eye for injustice and a belief that there are ways to change these injustices.

This is especially clear as she maps out the feminist culture at the time she was starting to sell vibrators at Good Vibrations and become part of On Our Backs. The clash between what women were being told they were supposed to be doing in the name of feminism and what women were exploring sexually provided for plenty of drama, and Bright is at perhaps her sharpest here, highlighting both the thrill of being part of something new and visionary as well as the death threats that came with it. During this time, Bright also becomes a mother and there are some very poignant observations about the credit she was given, by random neighbors and others who previously would have dismissed her, and how the process of becoming a parent helped her see that she was not doomed to repeat her mother's mistakes.

This book is admittedly not an attempt to document an exhaustive history of either The Red Tide, On Our Backs, or Susie Bright's entire life, and the stories she did choose to tell are illuminating. She doesn't lose that youthful spirit of wanting to shake things up that she had at sixteen, even in the face of ostracism from within the ranks of the IS or the lesbian or feminist worlds. She does, however, make choices she needs to to best protect herself and her family. This is a powerful book that will, perhaps, leave you unsettled...in a good way. The writing is so rich, too (she describes Andrea Dworkin as "Like arguing with Freud but being happy he was taking you for a ride.), and Bright is clearly not just rehashing the same old stories. The final chapters, in which she is served with papers, there's a murder and Bright grapples with motherhood, are particularly dramatic, but there is a gracefulness to Bright's words, one that doesn't mute any of the horror of the details she's revealing, but that in fact leaps off the page. It highlights the reality that truth is stranger than fiction and certainly makes the book go out with a bang. A fascinating read whether you're familiar with Bright's book or not, whether you share her political beliefs or not; this is a memoir about finding companionship as well as fierce opposition among the rebels, and figuring out when to stand one's ground and when to find new ground to stand on. (less)

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May 23, 2011 Monica rated it 4 of 5 stars

I just read this book in a day. I had to stand in line at court today, and had brought this along with me, and I was so absorbed I didn't even notice that a minor altercation had broken out in front of me until the growing group of sheriffs started questioning us at to what we'd soon. Oops. Oddly, I'd been reading what I thought was the weaker part of the book, about the splits in the socialist group Bright had worked with in Detroit.

Some good quotes in here. I hope I can find them again.

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Apr 29, 2013 Tiayra Tucker rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sex

Stopped reading this halfway in. Normally if I can't finish a book, I give it one star. But this was actually well-written, so I can't put my finger on what it is that I dislike about it. I just couldn't stay interested. I guess it wasn't what I expected.

For one thing, it's called "a memoir" when it's not. It's an autobiography with every detail of her entire life, relevant or not. She includes the history of her grandparents, and spends an entire chapter talking about why her parents' marriage...more

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Jul 06, 2011 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

This is the first time that I have actually heard the author read the book that they wrote. I love how her actual emotion came across while listening that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to read.
Susie is amazing in her genre and I can honestly say that I didn't know much about her before this book. I'm so glad that I got a chance to read/listen to what she has to say. The greatest thing about a memoir is that even though I may not believe everything that the author does, I can still respect...more

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Jul 11, 2011 Umachan Lovchik rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-nonfiction

I'm not one for having idols, but Susie Bright (along with Pat Califia and Carol Queen) played a huge role in the development and articulation of my belief that we don't have to fit into anyone's box when self-defining gender and sexual identity. She is amazingly articulate, open minded and honest. To be allowed into her history is a gift. If you are not familiar with Ms. Bright, be forewarned that this book is sexually graphic (she's not called "Susie Sexpert" without reason). A great account o...more

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Mar 12, 2011 Crystal rated it 5 of 5 stars

Susie Bright has given us a brave, funny, even-handed, and culturally astute American political memoir of family, love, learning, revolution, sex, friendship, mothering, reconciliation, more revolution, and more love. I've been looking forward to reading this book since learning in 2008 that it was in the works; I wasn't disappointed.

Recommended for feminist workers and feminist culture warriors of all ages.

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Mar 22, 2012 Jenny rated it 5 of 5 stars

I met Susie in person at her book reading for this book and I was overwhelmed with how great she is and I loved the book excerpts that she read and I admire her so very much. And I loved reading this book, very inspirational, and I don't really know what else to say. Hurray for Susie Bright! She has made my world a brighter place.

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Apr 04, 2012 Linda rated it 1 of 5 stars

I was very disappointed in this book. It seems that Susie has lived a fascinating life, full of adventure. Her retelling, however, failed to hold my attention. The timeline is very choppy and she provides too many details about unimportant events while glossing over the more interesting parts of her story. Maybe her other books are better but I doubt I will read another to find out.

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Jan 25, 2012 dolores added it · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

I received this audio book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

Audiobooks are not my favorite medium. I found the narration to be a bit dry at times and found myself distracted quite often. I would have preferred to read this in book-form.

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Oct 20, 2012 Lesley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I quite enjoyed this, and I realise that it's very much about a personal odyssey, but there were points where I'd have liked just a bit more about the broader context within which her experiences were happening.

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title link	preview: Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir
avg rating	preview: Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir Goodreads rating: 3.50 (193 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9786902-big-sex-little-death?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328746849l/9786902.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9786902-big-sex-little-death?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir by Susie Bright[/url]

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