The Happiest Girl In Town
The rest of you may be living through a slow motion coup d’etat and the final death throes of the white ruling class press but me, I’m in the South of France in 1965, reading about the sexual machinations of a German-Swiss woman’s marriage.
I heard about Guess Who Is The Happiest Girl in Town? by Susi Wyss from a post on the Cut and immediately knew it was my type of book. It is a 830 page memoir of one woman’s sexual inner life from childhood in WWII-era Switzerland to a doomed young marriage in Apartheid-era South Africa to magically falling in with a pack of jet-setting, super rich swingers in 1960s and 70s Paris. A copy costs something like 90 dollars because the book is filled with beautifully reproduced artistic nudes the author took and photos of her partying with Salvador Dali and Mick Jagger. Eventually, at the unusual age of 35, Wyss became a sex worker before retiring at 40. Every few sections are accompanied by her hand-drawn illustrations of herself and the actual book itself is bound in good black cloth and has etchings on the front and back in lavender thread. The opening sentence is “I was born a Capricorn.” It is a true object of luxury and I can’t stop reading it. I’m on page 200 and just happy there’s 600 more.
It follows the usually very boring rhythms of every sex memoir which is some bland, non-specific descriptions of feeling/places broken up every few pages by explicit but not very evocative descriptions of sex. But Susi, or the character she presents of herself on the page, is such a strange observer, such an idiosyncratic personality, that the monotony is easy to overlook. She tells us off hand that her mother was so poor she used to stand in cow shit to stay warm. She veers off to describe a sexy hypnosis session for no reason. She talks about her childhood scoliosis. She also seems to be genuinely confused why her monogamous husband might be upset that she ideal marriage is one where they just go around picking up people together. It is actually adorable, her inability to understand, and it is a reminder, as a student of history and social mores, that you can read about a culture’s intense hatred or taboos around sex but for every top-down message like that, there are people just living in that culture, going about their own sexual ways, genuinely mystified why they are occasionally out of step. When the person in question is unattractive, it is a tragedy. When they’re hot, as Susi repeatedly tells us she is, the likelihood that it becomes merely a farce increases.
That’s what I like about this book, too—Susi likes sex, has it every other page, and stays happy. I think that is what makes this memoir fall into the camp of pornography rather than literature—pornography is probably one of the few genres in which a woman can enjoy sex with multiple partners without the world of the narrative necessitating her dying or succumbing to social shame.
But that is perhaps too pat an observation. I am comparing Wyss’s story to that in Full Service, another excellent sexual memoir by Scotty Bowers. That book is also written in a cheerful, “we’re all just here for some good old fashioned fun and isn’t it hilarious that Katherine Hepburn used to hire my girl friends to have sex with here and this low-level 50s comedian used to pay a friend of mine to take a shit in a pie pan”-vibes. But Full Service takes a very mournful and disturbing tone when Bowers notes the sexual abuse he experienced as a child—which he frames as his initiation into the life of casual sex, not abuse. This is kind of a hallmark of sex memoirs, if you read enough of them. The writer will often insist that everything was wonderful, everything was free, while including a telling detail that makes it clear they exist in the same reality we do—where sex is as much about power and control as it is about pleasure. In The Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist and Sexual Renegade, the enduring image from that book is of Steward in the middle of an orgy he himself put together in his apartment, sitting on the sidelines, watching everything and obsessively cataloging it on index cards for later.
The coercion, abuse, loneliness and melancholy that suffuses so many of our sexual histories is hard to parse from what I always wish from a sex memoir—unbridled joy. The only person who I think has gotten the balance completely right—the trauma and the horror and the decision to go ahead and fuck again, anyways, because you are alive—is Collette in her Claudine novel cycle. The first two, Claudine at School and the second Claudine in Paris, are very much in the vein of a Susi Wyss. Collette writes beautiful, clever sentences about a self-possessed 13 year old Claudine who tries to seduce her beautiful tutor but loses her to an older woman. And who moves to Paris, cuts her hair in a chic bob and attracts an older man she insists on calling her uncle who is also hot and fantastically rich and just happens to want to marry her. But in Claudine Married and Claudine and Annie the events of the previous books are recast and remembered with an emotional complexity that was missing and we begin to see a woman who believes in her own pleasure above all else reckon with what it means when that pleasure is curdled by abuse and coercion.
But on page 200 of Guess Who Is the Happiest Girl in Town? none of that darkness has entered yet, at least from that corner. I will say, Wyss is the kind of blithe racist you usually find in Northern Europe—the kind of white person who tells you, earnestly, that they love how dark your skin is and think it is very sexy and don’t understand how you would not take their gaze as a compliment. She spends a lot of time talking about the various Asian men she meets in Paris, sometimes lovingly, sometimes dismissively, but always with the air that they are not serious romantic partners. And every Black person she encounters is a “magnificent creature.” She seems genuinely amused whenever a potential sexual partner curves her for a Black girl—less, “how could he?'“ and more “I would’ve done the same” type of reaction.
I used to read sex memoirs obsessively in high school. Like all teenagers, I was horny and curious and like all nerds, I had been told that if I wanted the answers to something, a book somewhere would have them. They never did, though. I tried de Sade but quickly grew bored. I read some memoirs of cis-het white women sex workers, part of a mini-boom of those in the late 90s, and was turned off by how blindingly white and straight the worlds they described were. I would read those books and in every one they skipped over the part I wanted to know—how did you go from admiring a stranger to hitting on them? How did you reconcile desire with action? How did you know if your desire came from a place of fun or trauma? How did you make sure your desire led you to pleasure and not more pain?