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Love : All
‘Quite the funniest novel I have read in a long while.’ Daily Telegraph
‘At last puts on paper a lot of people’s sexual fantasies.’ Liverpool Daily Post
Molly Parkin's ‘Love All’ gives us Myopia, a snapshot of the author herself in her day – colourful, warm, artistic, bohemian, sexually promiscuous, decadent, focused on the here and now, but far-sighted in spite of her name, oblivious of convention, perceiving life to be a seesaw opportunity for passion and anxiety, and with no time at all for the latter.
The French called the book ‘Je ne sais pas dire non’, but the author doesn’t draw on her deep well of sexual experience only to analyse nymphomania. No one man is enough for Myopia even if they do satisfy her in bed. Myopia is a rebel. She is cutting free to create her own persona in the face of a world of hypocrisy, imperfection and greed.
This is extreme reality, the late 1960s when women became disillusioned with systems of restraint and subjugation that had for millennia been used to control their thoughts. For Myopia, no-one is to be relied on, other than herself.
But ultimate freedom eludes her, for one dominant man in the author’s life thwarted her existential endeavour since she was a very young girl, by warping it with an awful eagerness to please.
Although fingered in the first and last pages, the culprit went unnoticed by the novel’s myopic readers when the book was first published. And indeed he – as real as every other character in this astonishing book – is someone only now, that the author is ready fully to reveal. Her father...
'About Molly Parkin'
Molly Parkin, painter, erotic novelist, poet, lyricist, performer, and Grande Dame of bohemian living, was born in Pontycymmer in South Wales. She won scholarships to both Goldsmiths and Brighton art colleges, became an art teacher and then a successful artist in her own right, before rising in the Swinging Sixties to dominate the worlds of fashion and style as fashion editor of Nova and Harper’s Bazaar, and then for four years The Sunday Times.
Simultaneously she became just as famous for her remarkable appetite for sex. ‘John Mortimer; George Melly; Louis Armstrong; John Thaw; Bo Diddley – her lovers were as varied as she was energetic,’ wrote Matthew Bell in the Independent in January 2012, ‘though she's been celibate for 20 years. Well, almost. There was a knee-trembler with a surfer in the disabled loo of Las Vegas airport a few years ago: she was 74, he was 23.’
Bell got it wrong. Says Molly, ‘It wasn’t a knee-trembler, it was a lyrical coupling, and it occurred in the Gents loo of the Hotel Bellagio.’
Her amorous and outrageous experiences – including presiding over orgies in New York’s Chelsea Hotel – are the real-life basis of a bestselling series of 10 comic erotic novels beginning with ‘Love All’.
‘At last puts on paper a lot of people’s sexual fantasies.’ Liverpool Daily Post
Molly Parkin's ‘Love All’ gives us Myopia, a snapshot of the author herself in her day – colourful, warm, artistic, bohemian, sexually promiscuous, decadent, focused on the here and now, but far-sighted in spite of her name, oblivious of convention, perceiving life to be a seesaw opportunity for passion and anxiety, and with no time at all for the latter.
The French called the book ‘Je ne sais pas dire non’, but the author doesn’t draw on her deep well of sexual experience only to analyse nymphomania. No one man is enough for Myopia even if they do satisfy her in bed. Myopia is a rebel. She is cutting free to create her own persona in the face of a world of hypocrisy, imperfection and greed.
This is extreme reality, the late 1960s when women became disillusioned with systems of restraint and subjugation that had for millennia been used to control their thoughts. For Myopia, no-one is to be relied on, other than herself.
But ultimate freedom eludes her, for one dominant man in the author’s life thwarted her existential endeavour since she was a very young girl, by warping it with an awful eagerness to please.
Although fingered in the first and last pages, the culprit went unnoticed by the novel’s myopic readers when the book was first published. And indeed he – as real as every other character in this astonishing book – is someone only now, that the author is ready fully to reveal. Her father...
'About Molly Parkin'
Molly Parkin, painter, erotic novelist, poet, lyricist, performer, and Grande Dame of bohemian living, was born in Pontycymmer in South Wales. She won scholarships to both Goldsmiths and Brighton art colleges, became an art teacher and then a successful artist in her own right, before rising in the Swinging Sixties to dominate the worlds of fashion and style as fashion editor of Nova and Harper’s Bazaar, and then for four years The Sunday Times.
Simultaneously she became just as famous for her remarkable appetite for sex. ‘John Mortimer; George Melly; Louis Armstrong; John Thaw; Bo Diddley – her lovers were as varied as she was energetic,’ wrote Matthew Bell in the Independent in January 2012, ‘though she's been celibate for 20 years. Well, almost. There was a knee-trembler with a surfer in the disabled loo of Las Vegas airport a few years ago: she was 74, he was 23.’
Bell got it wrong. Says Molly, ‘It wasn’t a knee-trembler, it was a lyrical coupling, and it occurred in the Gents loo of the Hotel Bellagio.’
Her amorous and outrageous experiences – including presiding over orgies in New York’s Chelsea Hotel – are the real-life basis of a bestselling series of 10 comic erotic novels beginning with ‘Love All’.
- GenresFiction
191 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1974
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