The truth is stronger than fiction: telling the truth about black women's sexual lives.

Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. By Tricia Rose. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, 415 pages. Cloth, $25.00.

This collection of Black women's sexual narratives is long overdue. The author presents 20 (not 19, as the book jacket states) oral histories from women who represent a wide range of ages, sexual orientations, socioeconomic classes, educational levels, and life experiences. The women featured in the book share stories about the messages they received about sex from parents, other family members, and friends. In the interviews, the participants talk about their experiences with masturbation, orgasm, and menstruation. They also talk, in fairly graphic detail, about their experiences with sexual abuse, pregnancy, and abortion. These stories, often difficult to read, are even more difficult to put down. Compelling, gripping, touching, and painful, these narratives illustrate Black women's struggles to forge caring, respectful, and loving relationships with their own bodies, with each other, and with sexual partners.

Surrounded by an introduction and an afterword, the narratives are organized into three sections, with a small prelude to each section. The first section, titled "Through the Fire," features seven women's stories that, according to Rose, highlight "the difficult, unpredictable, and ongoing process of negotiating sexuality" (p. 14-15). The second section, titled "Guarded Heart," presents the stories of six women who illustrate self-protection in the face of challenges. Finally, "Always Something Left to Love" conveys a theme of possibility and hopefulness, and the narratives in this section emphasize a commitment to love and to be loved. Rose states that each woman's story illustrates, to some extent, all of these themes, and that the placement of each story into a chapter was a question of emphasis only.

The question of organization is a difficult one, and Rose appears to have given a great deal of thought to the organization of the interview data. After conducting hours of interviews, what are the best ways to present the findings? An author can take one of several approaches. One, which Rose considers in the introduction, is to organize the data around a central theme. We can see, for example, how a certain group of women have faced a certain life event. The author can use pieces of the interviews that are illustrative of the points that he or she wishes to analyze. This approach allows the reader to see similarities and differences across a number of people, but it necessarily breaks their stories into fragments, and it presents the author as the expert and authority. Rose is critical of this approach when she writes, "We do not hear the women's voices in all their glorious, sometimes contradictory, complexity.... Cutting up such intimate stories into bits and pieces repeats a kind of silencing even as it claims to give voice" (p. 56). Another solution is to place the narratives into what Rose calls "story containers." "Rape victim," "incest survivor," "virgin," "single mother," or "lesbian" are potential containers that, according to Rose, provide a one-dimensional understanding of the woman's experience (p. 6). Many women are simultaneously incest survivors, single mothers, and lesbians, for example. Where would we put their stories? Can we use these simplistic categories when women's lives are much more complex and multidimensional? The introduction provides a serious critique of common approaches to the presentation of qualitative interview data.

Mindful of the pitfalls associated with various approaches, Rose chose to make each chapter a different woman's story and to present an uninterrupted first-person narrative with no analysis. This presentation represents a conscious effort to respect the integrity of Black women, who have historically been marginalized, misrepresented, and voiceless. However, I found that this presentation style ultimately did not solve the problems that I hoped it would address. Although the author presents these chapters as narratives that allow her participants to speak for themselves in a less fragmented way, every chapter in this book is necessarily a fragment of the original interview. In the introduction, we see the general sorts of topics that Rose asked the women to discuss, but we do not see the text of the actual comments or questions posed to each individual woman. It is thus impossible to know when the participant was prompted to say more or encouraged to change topics.

By omitting the interview questions, the narratives can feel choppy, with participants appearing to abruptly jump from topic to topic without any indication of the question or comment that brought them there. Additionally, the narratives were written in paragraph form. The organization of interview data in this way transforms the participant's words into chunks of digestible thoughts, when they were not originally so neat. I admire the author's intentions to respect the wholeness and integrity of her participants' stories, but her presentation choices contribute to the same type of fragmentation that she critiqued.

When you plunge into the narratives, however, you won't care about the fragmentation. These are honest, emotional accounts of heartbreak, confusion, and empowerment. Supplementing every empirical journal article attempting to explain the transmission of HIV in Black communities, we have Linda Rae (all names in the book are disguised), who provides details about sexual abuse at the hands of her brother, her drug use, prostitution, and the context in which she acquired HIV. Linda Rae says that she was infected from her male partner, an IV drug user, who hid his HIV-positive status from her. The reader can learn a great deal about the complicated relationship between early life events and the sexual choices one later makes as an adult. Linda Rae's story is a cautionary tale, but she is not a helpless stereotype of a victim. This narrative puts a human face on the stereotypes surrounding Black women infected with HIV, and it stresses the importance of prevention and education.

The theme of incest and sexual abuse is, unfortunately, a common one throughout the book. One woman recounts 8 years of sexual abuse by one biological brother and three stepbrothers. She discusses the experience of closeness and affection with her brothers that, although tender, is also entangled with feelings of shame and embarrassment. Another woman, Rhonda, in her mid-30s, also discusses her own brother's violent sexual advances and tries to find ways to piece together evidence that this really happened to her so that she can talk to her mother about the events. Her mother greets this evidence with silence, and the reader feels dissatisfied. Where's the tidy ending? Where's the admission of guilt, followed by family therapy, catharsis, and healing? These narratives do not end neatly. In fact, most of these stories end in messy and dissatisfying ways. Situations do not always resolve themselves, and the women often fall back into thoughts, behaviors, and relationship patterns that are unproductive, if not downright dangerous. These narratives remind us that the women are works in progress. Their stories are not over, even though each respective chapter may end. Although this is hardly comforting, it is real, and it is the story of real women's lives.

Rose also asked the women to reflect on the complicated interrelationships between sexuality and race. Some of these reflections may be familiar to readers, and some may not. Cocoa, for example, a dark-skinned Black woman, talks about her attempts to lighten her skin and change her hair to be more attractive to men. She says, "My being dark-skinned has made me think I'm not pretty or that I have to do things for guys to like me, or for people to like me" (p. 168). Others reflect on their own negative experiences with Black men and have decided to start or continue dating outside of their race. Shanice, for example, who is discovering her multiracial family background and who has had some negative experiences with Black men, has decided not to be "... associated with African American and Black culture anymore. I'm trying to just be on my native tip and just find out about the Cherokee side of me" (p. 385). Generalizations are not to be found in this book, however, and mixed in with disparaging views of men are tender accounts of loving and respectful relationships and good marriages.

In a second edition of this book, I would hope to learn much more about the interview methods. Rose does not tell us how the women were recruited or where or when the interviews were held (popular culture references provide the reader with the best indications of the years in which the interviews were conducted). Further, after reading all of the narratives, I was looking forward to Rose's analysis and her take on how the narratives fit into the larger body of research literature on Black female sexuality. Although she does refer to works by Darlene Clark Hine, Dorothy Roberts, and Paula Giddings, there is no reference to any work by Gall Wyatt, arguably the nation's foremost authority on the psychological experiences of Black women and their sexuality. This omission suggests that Tricia Rose's project is very different from the kind of qualitative analysis that most sex researchers, scholars, and therapists expect. Her project appears largely to be a presentation of raw data, and those of us who wish to analyze the narratives and put them in a larger social or historical context (or have our students do so) will have plenty to keep us busy.

All in all, although I was disappointed with the limited analysis, I was impressed with the project as a whole. This collection of narratives, long overdue and so important to the erosion of negative sexual stereotypes about Black women, represents a major contribution to the body of knowledge about Black women's sexuality. This work is important, groundbreaking, and thought provoking. Not only do these women, and other women, need to tell their own stories, but we all need to hear them as well.

Reviewed by Marcelle Christian Holmes, Ph.D., Pomona College, Department of Psychology, 550 N. Harvard Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711; e-mail: [e-mail].