[Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for myself abo...

[Thrst4knw at aol.com]

I'll add my voice to Frank's in recommending Alice's novel "Trine Erotic."  
Here's the review I posted to Amazon in 2002 ...

Witty, wise, and wonderful: brings biology back to life !, March 20, 2002
Reviewer:Todd I. Stark "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - 
      
This is something brand new to me and which caught me completely by 
surprise--a biologically informed love story. One of those wonderful books 
that takes useful, interesting intellectual ideas and makes them real and 
palpable in people's lives. The book is filled with delightfully primal 
themes voiced in a very modern idiom. It doesn't just tug at your emotions, 
it tugs at them through your brain by weaving a nest of stories that 
interlock and share meanings. 
This is not biology in the old sense of simple "animal instincts" or even 
just the recent sense of selfish genes and the mathematics of human 
relationship games. It is also biology informed by our modern understanding 
of how we create and transmit meaning through words. The roles of the "meme" 
or fuzzy unit of culture, feature prominently as conceptual undercurrents 
here. Then the author takes it way beyond being a unit of culture and 
illustrates by her own masterful example how it is also an agent of human 
transformation. 
Many people talk about how human beings are linked by their stories, but in 
Trine Erotic, the author demonstrates just how fundamental a mode of 
communication the story can be. Her characters reveal the deep strategies 
behind their feelings and behaviors, while trying to sort them out from their 
excuses for their own behaviors. 
Through her own storytelling, Alice Andrews seduces the reader into layer 
after layer of change in their own understanding, all the while explaining 
what she is doing. This is a relatively new and interesting form of 
introspective art that both inspires and teaches. 
Two problems ... we aren't used to art being quite so aware of its own role, 
especially in scientific terms, and we usually aren't comfortable with women 
consciously cutting through the haze of erotic games to see their own 
relentless Darwinian logic. It's exciting and a bit disconcerting as well to 
see female sexuality both revealed and unleashed in this light. 
Andrews's female leads have the terrifying but exciting freedom we wish we 
had, 
while still being immersed in misgivings of their own making, trying to sort 
out complex webs of feeling and what it all means. 
Not only did I find this book a delight, but I've put it on my list of books 
to read when people want to learn about how themes of evolutionary biology 
can be applied to real life.
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