The Sex Life of the Everyday Woman

"The Sex Life of the Everyday Woman," is the story of poet Dina Byrne Lopez who ends her marriage to her husband of almost two decades. His addiction to cocaine, hence his name...Cocaine Baby...and inability to change pushes Dina into a life of self discovery. Her sexuality is a large part of her new life as she falls in love with Will, someone she knew before she married Cocaine Baby. Her search for love and her longing to undo the addictions in her life that began with her father and in her childhood are explored in Kareena Maxwell's introspective and poetic style..."Dina is lonely. Her father taught her this emotion. He nurtured her in it with his blindness; with his hush. The house where her father learned about the sun she was swallowed in loneliness. She lonelied in there; she cried in there. In the house where her Valentine's Day voice bounced off the attic roof she could feel her old loneliness: The lonely that taught her how to play hide-and-seek in between Cocaine Baby and Carlito." The Sex Life of the Everyday Woman is Kareena Maxwell's profile of many women who stay in troubled marriages for too long. Dina, like many women, grieved as she moved forward and shed her lovelessness. She is in many ways an "everyday" woman, but as Maxwell shows what Dina is thinking, she also makes it clear that she is in no way ordinary.