When Sexual Desires Turn Addictive

Single Sex — (Image credit: C. Steinhausen)

There were a few months when I sometimes slept with three men in one day." So said Susan Cheever in her 1999 memoir, Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker. So is Cheever - the thrice-married daughter of John Cheever, the alcoholic man of letters - a sex addict? In her new book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, the memoirist explores the depth and cost of her own dubious coping strategies.

MC: There is a lot of prurient interest in this book. Why did you write it? SC: I'm afraid some people are going to be disappointed because it isn't: "I slept with this one and I slept with that one." The book isn't a memoir about my sexual adventures; it's a search for answers to the question, Where does passion end and addiction begin?

MC: So where does it begin? SC: I thought I could just come up with an ironclad list of symptoms, but when I talked to experts, they mostly disagreed. But there is some consensus: There's obsession, there's never satiety, and there's always remorse. For me, the big thing is that you're always breaking a promise - for example, you promise yourself you're just going to have coffee with a man, then before you know it, you're in bed together.