Amo

by Alice Denham

AMO, the feminist Centerfold from Outer Space, visits earth to teach spaced-out sex and equality.
She confronts Mal the homicidal Revolutionary, Benno the hilarious Mafioso, Whit the insane psychoanalyst, and Pelf the nudie publisher. AMO is an amazing carnival of sexual violence, discrimination, juicy sex and lofty planetary ideals. First, she must fight off a nutcase who is choking her to death...

244 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Alice Denham (born January 21, 1933 in Jacksonville, Florida) is an American model, writer and scholar. She was Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month for the July 1956 issue. Her centerfold was photographed by Mike Shea and Lawrence Tirschel. Denham posed for other men's magazines during her modeling career, but she was as well known for her academic achievements as for her physical attributes. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina in 1949 and a master's degree from the University of Rochester in 1950, and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society. Her writing talents were obvious to Playboy; several Playmates have written the text that accompanied their pictorials, but Denham is the only Playmate to have written a short story that was published in the same issue as her centerfold. Denham pursued a career in writing and education. She's written several short stories and novels, including Amo and My Darling from the Lions, and taught creative writing at the City College of New York, where she served as an adjunct professor of English from 1970 to 1980. She also held fiction-writing seminars at the University of Toronto for several years. According to The Playmate Book, she has completed her memoirs and also is writing a non-fiction book about her family's "migration from South Carolina and Scotland to Florida at the time of the Seminole Indian Wars."

Reviews

[Mark Cofta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Denham signed this book for me in 1977 at a writers' workshop in Toronto, but I hadn't read it until now; it sort of got lost in my collection, and I was "saving" it for a special time. As life keeps teaching us, those times don't come -- do it, whatever it is, now, instead of waiting for the "right time."

Anyway, what a great book! I wish I had read it way back then and sent it to the late Harlan Ellison. (I wonder if he ever met Denham.) I wish I had read it and reached out to her before she passed away. But the next worst thing to waiting for the "right time" is wishing we had done things earlier -- it's just another time-wasting trap.

AMO shows its age (pub. 1974), with some now-inappropriate language, but also reveals its age, a time of casual and brutal misogyny, as the title character -- a nude model and aspiring writer -- is mistreated by nearly all the many men in her life, who see her not as a person, let alone an artist, but only as a body to be used and tossed away. Shades of Vonnegut, she invents an alien culture in which males have been cured of their "gobbling" ways -- their rapacious greed and aggression, especially against women. Unfortunately, Amo battles Earthmen and their unchecked "gobbling" for a long time before achieving the success she desires.

A richly feminist novel, AMO probably offended some feminists with its frank and unapologetic sexuality. We're still "slut-shaming" women today, though now we have that term for it, harshly judging women who men find sexually alluring, women who enjoy sex, and women who make money revealing their bodies.

I'm now determined to find and read all I can by and about Alice Denham, only 43 years later than I should have. Oh well. I know from meeting her and from reading AMO that she was a divine force!

[Eric]

Looking forward to reading this sometime. Was sorry to read that the author passed away in 2016 (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/ar... ) though this is not reflected as of right now in her Goodreads profile.