text: THE WILD OATS PROJECT . by Robin Rinaldi . (Hodder £14.99) At the age of 42, San Francisco-based journalist Robin Rinaldi believed she had accidentally succeeded in conceiving a longed- for child. The pregnancy test turned out to be wrong, but her husband Scott wasn’t taking any more chances: he got a vasectomy. Rinaldi’s response was to demand an open marriage and bed 12 strangers in as many months. She’s now written a graphic, tell-all memoir about that year and its very messy fallout. Robin Rinaldi (pictured) demanded an open marriage from her husband, Scott after he had a vasectomy . When they met, 17 years earlier, Rinaldi wasn’t sure she wanted kids. As her biological clock began ticking louder, though, a child came to embody the solution to all sorts of problems. It would strengthen their marriage of opposites, help her finally overcome a troubled childhood as the daughter of an alcoholic bookie and give her life a sense of purpose. Her husband, meanwhile, was adamantly against it from the start. For reasons she never quite gets to the bottom of, he has no desire ever to become a father. She depicts him as stable and stoic but, frankly, he sounds a bit of a cold fish, spending much of his spare time making mead, keeping a file on his laptop entitled My World View and refusing to look her in the eye during sex. After his vasectomy, Rinaldi’s discontent settles onto her failure to sleep around when she was single. ‘I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,’ she declares. ‘If I can’t have one, I must have the other.’ Promiscuity, she’s certain, will enable her to look back from her deathbed and feel she’s lived. Instead of ending her marriage, she strikes a bargain that seems to give her the best of both worlds. During the week, Rinaldi lives in a rented studio, free to have as much casual sex as she likes. She picks up men on business trips, places ‘good girl seeks experience’ ads online and, eventually, gravitates to an urban sex commune, where very hands-on orgasmic meditation is practised twice daily. Come the weekend, she returns to Scott and their cat Cleo — no questions asked. Reading about her Wild Oats Project, it’s hard to know what’s more astonishing — that Scott ever agreed to this 5:2 open marriage or that Rinaldi thought it could possibly solve anything. Full disclosure: some years ago, I published a memoir about my own year-long experiment — with chastity. Afterwards, several people told me I should write a follow-up in which I did the exact opposite. I assumed they were joking, but that’s more or less precisely what Rinaldi has done. Not that it isn’t titillating stuff — at least to begin with. What she craves most especially is dirty talk, and she gives as good as she gets. There’s no hint of coyness as she details every sexual act she participates in along the way. As it gets steamier, her prose flushes a deep purple. There’s also some truly terrible dialogue. ‘Hmmm,’ she says, after being given technique tips by a 23-year-old she’s just slept with. ‘Roger that.’ Reading about another person’s orgasms turns out to be just as dull as flipping through their dream journal. Of her 12 partners, most are younger and two are women, one of whom agrees to a threesome. Yet they soon start to merge. This is California, and every other lover seems to be a vegan or a healer or a vegan healer. They strum her songs they’ve written as she fries them soya sausages. Only one of them really gets to her. Alden is a writer in his late-30s. They meet online and quickly tumble into bed. ‘In his sheets, I uncovered women who had lain dormant in me for years,’ she trills. He tells her she’s a goddess and that he worships her — until he ends it, abruptly. Later, when Rinaldi’s year is up and she finds herself back living full-time with Scott, trying to patch up their — you guessed it — deeply fractured intimacy, it’s an email from Alden that finally derails everything. As more women cross childless into middle-age, there’s undoubtedly a book to be written about their journey. This is not it. In fact, Rinaldi seems able to define herself solely in relation to her fertility and her allure to men. So much for her feminism. To be fair, it isn’t entirely devoid of self-criticism. Narcissistic, naïve, unfair: these are all words she applies to herself at various moments. But, in addition to being myopically self-absorbed, this is also a sad book. By the time you reach the end, any gains she’s made are balanced by some considerable losses. And then there’s the book’s dedication. To Ruby, it reads — Ruby being the name she planned to give the child she’s now unlikely ever to have.
target: Aged 42 Robin Rinaldi believed she had conceived a longed-for child .
  The pregnancy test was negative and her husband had a vasectomy .
  Rinaldi then demanded an open marriage and slept with 12 people in a year .