You make a lot of discoveries in the book about your own sexual conservatism. But you were raised in quite a liberal household, right? What was your upbringing like in terms of attitudes to sex? I’m from a Midwestern background – my dad is a journalist and mum a book indexer, so we’re a very bookish family. They were born in the '40s as baby boomers, lived through the '60s, married in their 20s, and have been married for more than 40 years. I thought of my upbringing as free because the expectation I was raised with was that it’s fine to have sex as a teenager, I could talk to my mum about birth control and I wasn’t raised with sin looming over me. The difference was that my time of experimentation went on longer than theirs. I thought I would mimic them in terms of marriage, children and living in a house. When I started the book it was frustrating that that was evading me.

Do you think that’s a common feeling? Yes. At the time I was reading all these articles about single women and there’d been this demographic shift that was real, whereby people now get married much later and not at all. Everything that referred to this seemed to focus more on how women felt about it than men. Like other people, I think I was legitimately trying to make sense of my life, but I would read these articles almost compulsively. Many were lamentations about not being in the kind of relationship I also wanted, or echoed what I believed about monogamy representing the best sex and the most equal relationship a woman could have. In the book you talk about how those articles peddle the “economics of erotics” – this constructed idea that, if you sleep with lots of people, your value somehow goes down. I knew I had a frustration after reading these articles but I still carried that idea of sexual currency, these ideas that sex is cheap or that if you present yourself too sexually you’ll get the “wrong kind of attention”. I tried internet dating but didn’t present myself as a sexual being on it, even though I would have casual sex with my friends or people I meet at parties. Why wouldn’t I seek that out? Why did I need to present myself in a certain way? I guess I thought people who have certain types of relationships are either naïve or destructive.

It sounds to me like the age-old Madonna-Whore thing, or that idea that, if you present yourself as sexually available, you’ll never be seen as more than that. Totally. I realise that it's nothing new but it shocked me personally I was conservative in this way when I thought of myself as liberal.

Was the book and the move to San Francisco you thinking ‘Well, if I’m not going to get married right now, let’s go the other way?’ Well, when I got the book deal I was in a relationship that was ending and all I thought was, ‘I just want to fall in love and get married’, I actually didn’t want to have to deal with all this stuff. It came from an extremely pessimistic place but yes, it was like: ‘If this is what I have to live with I have to find some meaning in it’. So I came at it with anger but it made me so much happier to realise that we have all these possibilities available now about how to live. I wonder now why I was so scared of them before. I think we create false ideas about who we are and don’t actually test them.

What struck me was that these hypersexual situations you put yourself in came off as deeply unsexy – orgasmic meditation for example. Firstly, do you want to explain what that is for anyone who doesn’t know? And secondly, I’m curious, how did you find it? Orgasmic meditation is a practice where a woman takes off her pants and her partner remains fully clothed and strokes her clitoris for 15 minutes. It’s not meant to be foreplay or intercourse. It can happen between friends or near-strangers. It’s supposed to be a space between masturbation and sex where you can ponder the physical feelings in your body in a way that isn’t about romance or sex. The people that run this organisation are called One Taste and they’re rooted in the human potential movement of California – a kind of New Age, ‘You have to find out who you are’ type thing. That aspect made me extremely uncomfortable – every feeling you had was examined and discussed and you went to these workshops where you had to describe the blemishes on each other’s faces. I thought, ‘Why does this have to be a part of it?’ And the actual practice... it’s not like I had a crazy orgasm, which is not the point, but surprisingly I’m glad I tried it out... I was really sceptical but there was something about the experience where I came away understanding that I had been shutting down feelings in my body and experiencing sexual energy with anxiety.