Bright: Beyond the pleasure principle photo: Jill Posner Mommy's Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn and Cherry Pie By Susie Bright Thunder's Mouth, 169 pp., $13.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Bright shines when she peels away her own mystique and takes us inside the uncertainties of her sex life. These include a fling with a farmer who's taken her vibrator advice to heart and a frank assessment of her own "terrible" blowjob technique.

In the past, Bright saw sex everywhere; it sometimes seemed as though that were the only lens through which she viewed the world. Here, she tackles other topics, such as a friend's suicide, and looks at some of the downsides of our in-your-face sexual era. She still has strident moments of pro-sex propaganda ("I don't want to see any more young women turn thirty years old before they understand what a female orgasm is"), but there is a maturity to her writing. Rather than offering knee-jerk reactions to conservative attitudes toward sex, Bright grapples with the much tougher question of what sex can and can't add to our lives, most delightfully in twin tongue-in-cheek guides for men and women on "how to ruin your sex life." Bright doesn't try to make sex a panacea. Instead she attempts to leave a legacy for her daughter's generation, of adults who view sex as vital, political, powerful, and ever changing.