While I appreciate the level of careful introspection the author exhibits throughout, I personally find this book far too disorganized.  I realize that the author is carefully layering her experiences - past and present - to make her overlying point that sexuality is forced upon us at a very early age and in ways that we can't always discern.  But, again for me PERSONALLY, the writing style and format was not the best medium to convey her thesis. My rating is 3.5 stars, but I think this is clearly a case of "Your Mileage May Vary."

How We Desire, for me, is a traditional coming of age story. I feel that this area of "christian to coming to terms with their sexuality" is an over-saturated space. I enjoyed Carolin's story and thought it was honest. But I think I have read so many like it that it did not feel original.

I did not really love this. The writing was good and I liked Emcke's narrative throughout this but there were points and moments that seemed underdeveloped and I wished she would have talked about them more. It's an interesting read, more like a memoir than serious academic writing.

I appreciate the perspectives presented in this book. Are there parts that I don't agree with? Yes. Are there parts that I completely agree with? Yes. I think we need to remember that authors are people, and people are imperfect. We take can a book like this for what it is, a perspective that may not be our own, but still has value. i also appreciate the idea that desire, especially in regard to gender and sexuality, is fluid. I think we have a tendency to try to categorize people and things into neat little boxes for our comfort, but that just isn't realistic. This book offers a different way of thinking that I think is beneficial to readers!

This was an interesting title, but I thought it took a while to get where it was going in terms of the author coming to terms with her own identity. I like the juxtaposition with her classmate's experiences and how that shaped her own coming-to-terms with her sexuality, but it left me wanting more somehow.

Book content warnings: suicide, homophobia

How We Desire is a refreshing essay on identity, specifically where sexuality is concerned. Emcke writes about her Christian upbringing, which was filled with specific rules and boxes to follow and fill. Her essay discusses the importance of giving children complete information regarding their bodies. In a way, she also gives a nod to representation: Emcke didn't fully realize who she was and she couldn't put a name to her feelings because she didn't have examples to draw from. Throughout her essay, she also contemplates the suicide of her classmate. Emcke suspects becoming the homophobic taunts his classmates directed at him are part of the reason for his death. She recognizes her classmate was always on the fringes, and perhaps it was his sexuality that pushed him out of the group. 

I'd recommend the book because it's a coming-of-age essay. Although it does not focus on one defining event, it does show the progression of Emcke's identity from childhood until adulthood. Emcke is honest and thorough in her discussions, even mentioning how the way she presents herself must change depending on the context (because, in some parts of the world, her identity could mean death for her and those around her). I might keep this one in my collection in case someone I know needs to see something like it.

This book contains stories of Emcke’s youth, her travels abroad, het struggles as a member of the LGBT+, her love for music and the story of her childhood friend who committed suicide. I really enjoyed reading this book. Mainly the stories about Emcke’s travels abroad and the struggle as a LGBT person. Emcke gives you a story about her life, thoughts and truths. There were several parts of this book I fount very relatable and honest. I loved the parts where she took the time to write down questions, the What If’s! Other parts, like stories of her childhood friends, were sometimes quite lengthy, which I enjoyed less.  
I am happy NetGalley offered me to read this book and hope this honest review is helpful for someone.

"Anyone who complies with the norms can afford to ignore them." 

Stumbling across this memoir shortly after finishing Rachel Cusk's beautifully-written but dissatisfying novel 'Outline' (which I took to be auto-fiction) - in which the narrator is so invisible as to be infuriating - was an unexpected delight. Emcke's reflections on identity and social norms through the lens of desire are insightful, compassionate and generous. She examines her own life and experiences of desire/longing in an effort to understand what influenced her school peer, Daniel, to take his own life. Yet this isn't the story of woman's quest for 'answers' - as we know, there is little that is definitive in life. Emcke ponders if our collective/social silence about desire might be a key to dismantling the indivual suffering of many. This exploration of identity and ever-unfolding sexual discovery may well have stemmed from an indivual need to process grief, but it is so compassionately considered that it has much more to offer to many.

There were many reasons why I was drawn to this book: I'm the same age as the author, I spent a year in Germany aged 21 and I have a interest in sexuality and sexual identity which feeds into my own writing.  I found this a really honest, intelligent and moving work which questions the way different societies, cultures and religions approach the issues - quite an unusual fusion of memoir and sociology/gender studies, but extremely readable.

This is one of those rare books that give you access to the innermost thoughts and feelings of the author. I was struck by the willingness and determination of the author to open up to the reader, own up to her failures and weaknesses as well as her strengths and desires.

The book is written in the first person singular. This is Carolin Emcke talking to us -- to me -- about her childhood, her love of music, her shifting desires, the suicide of her friend Daniel; about her thoughts on the Catholic Church, German society and the class system in the 70s and 80s, the struggles of LGBTQ people for visibility, political recognition, for the right to live.

The narrative develops at the interstices between public and private. It is a memoir but also an essay articulated in the form of questions --and there are lots of questions here!-- that grow organically from the author's life experiences and choices, esp. her choice to live as a "half-ripe fig", i.e. as she explains, a teenager that is neither a girl nor a "manable" woman (terms that occur in tbe Babylonian Talmud). The author opts for "half-ripe" with all the connotations this suggests: a person who refuses to enter the "either-or" frame of mind. In most major religious systems, Emcke tells us, there are rituals that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. These rituals -which signify the arrival of sexual maturity- at the same time serve to fix desire once and for all.

"Religious and non religious societies agree in regarding the transition into adulthood not as a process or development, but a clearly delineated moment. [...] But what if coming of age and puberty don't coincide? What if they are put of sync with each other? And what if, instead of discovering our sexuality only once, during puberty, we discover it again later -- and then again after that?(p. 37)

These questions will not be new to those with an interest in queer theory. The strength of the book is how Emcke weaves together the personal and the political, the memoir and the essay. She talks of her friend Daniel who took his own life just before completing secondary school. Daniel is a focal point of the book, not because the author knows so much about him but precisely because she knows so little. A popular and well-liked kid, Daniel grows into an awkward adolescent gradually earning the taunts of his classmates. It's difficult to pinpoint the reasons why; he's still athletic and not effeminate. Yet something in him is out of sync with the overall atmosphere of the school. Carolin and another classmate are tasked with protecting and looking after him, but whilst happy to do so, they can't become friends to him either. Later, much later, the author finds out that Daniel had neen seen with a man, and speculates whether it was his frustrated homosexuality that led to his tragic end. The author also relates another incident that reveals the repressive climate at school where an otherwise popular boy is picked on and cruelly taunted by a bunch of pupils simply for displaying behaviour that was deemed not macho enough. The book is worth reading for this scene alone -- how Emcke harrowingly describes the feeling of getting trapped, beaten, taunted and humiliated.

There are a lot of themes in the book that had an impact on me -- the author's love of music is one. Emcke's description of her music teacher and his methods made me wish I had had such a teacher myself! The theme of music is interwovem into the narrative as Emcke says that music gave her the sensibility and conceptual tools to understand her shifting desire. "Modulation" in harmony is a term that denotes the transition from one key to another. Perhaps this compositional technique of major-minor tonality is also the best way to describe what was happening back then -- what Daniel, Tom [another gay friend] and I were going through, but also what countless others, homosexual or not, still experience today: that desire can develop and even change, that various forms of desire can exist in parallel, that one person can, at different times, feel quite different forms of lust and longing, some of which are fulfilled, while others will only ever be hinted at." (p. 201)

LGBTQ people who grew up in the 70s and 80s will see something of themselves in this book. The touching descriptions of nascent sexuality at a time that was gradually liberalising but still sexually repressive will bring back memories. Younger people will see some of their own struggles reflected in the book's narrative even though the cultural markers will differ. Overall, I thought this was a great great book revealing genuine power of feeling, and as such I recommend it to everyone.

I am grateful to netgalley and textpublishing for providing me a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The ARC is provided by Text Publishing and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The title of the book "How We Desire" by Carolin Emcke is very intriguing. People may think that Emcke writes how one can desire something. Yet the book turns to be a memoir about desire, sexuality and her experience in growing up realising that she is different than others. It leads the readers to an interesting fact about growing up in Germany in the 1970s. 

Emcke takes Daniel's life as her allegory. Daniel is a kid who could have been a gay who later committed suicide ending his life. Emcke then argues that the society has certain set of norms which alienates people who do not follow the norm. Emcke says; 

"We slip into norms the way we slip into clothes, putting them on because they're laid out ready for us, because someone pulls them over our heads, because they come to fit us or because, without even noticing, we come to fit them. We only notice norms as norms if we don't comply with them, don't fit them - whether or not we want to. Anyone with white skin regards the category of skin colour as irrelevant because in the life of a white person in the West, skin colour is irrelevant. Anyone who is heterosexual regards the category of sexual orientation as irrelevant because in the life of a heterosexual, sexual orientation can be irrelevant. Anyone who feels comfortable in his or her body regards the category of sex as self-evident because his or her body is never questioned. Anyone who complies with the norms can afford to doubt their existence."

What is also good from the book is how Emcke expands her explanation on the relation between desire and religion. She says; 
" In a sexually repressive world, whether Muslim or Catholic, where people are prevented from discovering their own lust, puberty is aborted or gets stuck in a time loop, and adult men remain in a state of pre-desire, wrapped in a cocoon of acquired shame. As a result their forbidden lust can, if at all, only be expressed in combination with guilt- that explains why it is often released violently."

I somehow could relate myself to Emcke's argument tho. As somebody living in a hetero-community, the LGBTIQ actors like Daniel is often marginalised. People tend to see him as someone different. That fixation of sexuality is the reason why most of the LGBTIQ actors in hetero-community do not want to come out of the closet. Luckily, Emcke was able to recognise her desire and had a turn of love from male partner to a female partner.  Anyway, as a conclusion remark,  I want to highlight that this book is a very interesting book which explores human desire and its expansion in socio-area.  It is -at last, very recommended book to read. ,

"Perhaps telling stories belongs to life the way silence belongs to death. And perhaps the only way to grasp the long truth of this story is to tell it." This is how Emcke starts off her book; she explores the social dynamics of desire and identity ("We aren't only what we want to be. We are also what others make of us."), the source of the creation of desire, the form it takes, the way it emerges and is expressed.

"We slip into norms the way we slip into clothes, putting them on because they're laid out ready for us, because someone pulls them over our heads, because they come to fit us or because, without even noticing, we come to fit them. We only notice norms as norms if we don't comply with them, don't fit them - whether or not we want to. Anyone with white skin regards the category of skin colour as irrelevant because in the life of a white person in the West, skin colour is irrelevant. Anyone who is heterosexual regards the category of sexual orientation as irrelevant because in the life of a heterosexual, sexual orientation can be irrelevant. Anyone who feels comfortable in his or her body regards the category of sex as self-evident because his or her body is never questioned. Anyone who complies with the norms can afford to doubt their existence."

While the text is primarily about sexual desire, Emcke continually expands the textual horizon, she discusses identity, as well as how can education both awaken desire and suppress those emotions; her observations on sex education, the relationship between religious and sexual maturity, or the awakening of their own lesbian desire are extremely acute and important. 

"Identities aren't only a matter of choice; they are also constructed, assigned, ascribed; they come accompanied by restrictions, by a history of criminalisation, by denunciation and neglect; they are bound up with prejudices, ignorance and convictions that are cited and passed on, in-jokes and conspirational whispers, out of sexual inhibition and contempt, handed down from generation to generation, in school books or adoption laws, films or seating plans." Emcke is adamant, yet delivers a poignant conclusion: "I can reject that. [...] But it won't make any difference to the social reality of the world where I live. I can try to sabotage things and undermine them; I can try to change reality. But until I have, it's a part of me."

Thanks to Text Publishing and Netgalley for the free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

How We Desire by Carolin Emcke is a memoir about sexuality, desire, and growing up to realize that you aren’t straight. As someone who has come to the same realization herself, a lot of points in this book resonated with me. It was an interesting glimpse into growing up in the 1970s in Germany.

Emcke’s reflections on Daniel, a kid who committed suicide and she felt could have been gay, in hindsight, were heartbreaking. To think about how different his life could’ve been now is a tragedy. In a really poignant section, Emcke discusses how if she’d seen a lesbian represented somewhere, it might’ve occurred to her sooner that she could love women. She could have found her desire at an earlier age if only there’d been better representation. 

 It felt at times slow and impersonal, but I felt compelled to pick it up because it hit home for me. 

4 stars/5

This striking translation of Carolin Emcke's How We Desire offers insight to the author's meditations on sexuality, power and the transformative capabilities of desire. She investigates her understanding of desire through past experiences in her life and her ultimate acceptance of her evolving sexuality, while also offering the reader a space to analyze their own.

While at times this book reads as a coming of age story, she hits relevant topics that bring attention to the complicated relationship between sexuality and societal expectations. Her work as a war correspondent and strong knowledge of German politics allow her to illustrate the shocking similarities of extremely different cultures' temperaments towards sex, gender relations and perceived norms.

This is an important read for anyone interested in the evolution of sex, desire and gender expectations on both a personal and global level.

How We Desire by Carolin Emcke is a meditative, philosophical exploration of both her own same-sex desires wrapped within memoir: childhood recollections of a childhood male friend, whose own same sex desires led to his own suicide. It is also a reflection of how desire can change over a lifetime, how from loving men, Emcke turned to loving women. 

She asks, “Why had no one told us that desire can shift like a musical key— that a source key, an initial form of lust can develop into another and sometimes yet another? Why isn’t this something people talk about? Why is sexuality deprived of its playful, light-hearted, dynamic side? Why are the tones and keys of lust seen in such static, limited, one-sided terms? Why doesn’t modulation play a part in the way we think about desire?” 

And once she has embraced her homosexuality, she imparts some pertinent truths about that love and its experience in the world. From being a journalist in many foreign places where she cannot reveal that yes, she loves, but not a man, to her own doorstep.  

“Desiring the way I do— and this is not the same for everyone else— also means being stared at on the street because we kiss or hold hands, being stared at in a hotel restaurant in the morning because it’s clear we’ve spent the night together— that we’ve had sex, that we’re in love. The looks are sometimes surprised, sometimes hostile, sometimes envious of a happiness that is so urgent and plain to see that it doesn’t shrink from being stared at…. It also means rarely seeing film characters who love the way we do. It means rarely being able to decide for ourselves when we want to be seen as a ‘we’ and when as an ‘I’— when our otherness matters.”

An interesting read – although its very philosophical tone, and its distance from overtly personal writing – sometimes served to distance me from the text itself.

I received a DIGITAL Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  
From the publisher --- 
Emcke, a former war correspondent, turns her reporter's eye to her own experiences, exploring questions about identity, sexuality and love. Emcke draws back the veil on how we experience desire, no matter what our sexual orientation. What if, instead of discovering our sexuality only once, during puberty, we discover it again later - and then again, after that? What if our sexuality reinvents itself every time the object of our desire changes? Emcke also examines how prejudice against homosexuality has survived its decriminalization in the west.

What do I think of this book? I get her point but she is a little too loud, in your face and shrill which is interesting as the book reads so darn slowly I could have used it instead of Xanax for not being to get to sleep. It is extensively researched but really dry and clinical and I did not like it at all, nor did I finish it: I mostly skipped through it.
I almost don’t know how to rank it as it was well written for a specific audience that did not include me. It would be a five-star textbook but a 1-star personal read so 2.5 rounded down to two works for me.

I was very interested by this book - fascinated, even - and in places validated by it, but not satisfied. It offers an engaging personal account of the way that desire can fluctuate and shape identity, without necessarily being coterminous with identity. However, there are serious limitations in Emke’s perspective and the ability of this book to present something more than a personal coming-of-age narrative.

The strength of this book is, by far, Emke’s storytelling (facilitated by Imogen Taylor’s translation). Recollecting events from her childhood, Emke mixes vivid descriptions of particular details (the woods behind her family home feature frequently) with lyrical recounts of repeated, almost ritualised activities. I was struck, for instance, by her description of early teenage parties, where she and her peers danced and made out without, apparently, much discrimination as to who they made out with, aside from the consistent boundary of gender. Descriptions of music lessons, of learning to deconstruct music as a text, are exquisite. Emke makes deft metaphorical links between music and experience of sexuality - she writes, for instance, of repetition and variation, and the inability to identify variations if one has never heard the theme isolated and defined, as comparable to her inability to recognise lesbian desire without an example thereof in her life.

I also really enjoyed Emke’s take on sexual identity formation - she writes of becoming gay, as a result of discovering her desire, rather than of her status as gay (which she prefers to lesbian, although she also uses lesbian throughout the book) being an innate thing which she discovered. She writes of how her adolescence - marked by gender-non-normative pursuits and by an affinity with a gay male friend - could be interpreted as full of ‘signs’ that she was ‘really gay’ all along, but she insists on the valid experience of eroticism and ‘falling in love’ with men throughout that time. I did feel, as I often do with memoir, that either some aspects of this aren’t fully interrogated, or that the balance between truth-telling and privacy has produced an odd result. Emke writes, insistently, that she desired and fell in love with men, but she never describes doing so, not as she describes desiring her first female partner or falling in love with her long term partner. She describes eroticism with men as entirely depersonalised, her male age peers interchangeable. If she desired any of them specifically, and she insists she does, she doesn’t describe it. What was the experience of falling in love with men like, and how different from women? I feel like I want to buy her a beer and pry these answers out of her.

The biggest problem I have with this book, however, is that it is not what it says on the cover. It is not a book about how we desire. It is a book about Carolin Emke’s experience of desire, contextualised with sharp insights into the experience of her age peers (although the insights are mostly reserved for her male age peers - while she has a knack for describing heterosexual male culture, she has very little to say about straight teenage girls, let alone women. There are some notes there about her alienation from her female peers, but other than that…). This is a memoir, not an academic or even journalistic survey of broader experience. Emke’s work as a journalist in non-western contexts crops up occasionally, but primarily in the context of how she feels and how she navigates alien cultural environments (complete with some not particularly nuanced reflections on her felt responsibility to Represent to those ‘oppressed by the norms that constrain them’ who may not even have a word for lesbian). The one flash of real complexity here is when she recounts the experience of her friend, a translator from Gaza, who after obtaining refugee status in Europe on grounds of his homosexuality, feels not liberated but repulsed by his experience of western gay culture. But this story is not interrogated - not linked up with any of the actually quite substantial writing on how common this experience is, or with her anecdotes about her friend Tom who desired the love of a man and was blindsided by his experience of lust, or of a Muslim female friend who enjoyed the freedom to drink in public in Europe.

Emke’s treatment of trans people, intersex people, and sex work is brief and dismissive. There are language issues - the one intersex person mentioned is introduced as a hermaphrodie, ‘transexual’ appears on a list of (in Emke’s view, restrictive) sexual identities alongside homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual even though one of these things is not comparable to the others. The terms transsexual, transvestite and transgender are all used, and I would be interested to compare to the German and see how accurately Taylor is transmitting Emke’s vocabulary. I know that cognates of ‘transexual’ are more commonly used in European languages than in English (and my impression is that continental trans communities have not been quite so strongly opposed to the usage - but cognates of transgender are coming into use and can be preferred for similar reasons to the English term), and if I were translating from French usage myself I would find that an interesting conundrum - transmit the original although the term is much more jarring to english audiences, or adapt? That’s a translation nerd question, though: the reality is that Emke mentions trans and intersex people as adjuncts to gay experience, primarily as case studies that illustrate the porousness of gender binarism: she does not actually engage in any meaningful way with trans experience, or with questions trans experience might raise about desire.

Likewise, Emke’s primary engagement with sex work is as an illustrative example - marking her alienation from her male peers by the moment when she realised she could not join them in objectifying street walkers. She notes that it is not ‘done’ to criticise sex work in the contemporary argument, makes a brief comment to the effect that no one takes sex trafficking seriously, but spends the bulk of that episode describing her disgust not just at her peers’ attitude to sex workers but at the transaction itself. She conflates her disgust at the idea of transactional sex with the sex workers themselves being disgusting, even as she complains about the legalised sex industry’s knack for sanitising the transaction while objectifying and degrading the woman involved. It’s not even a well-thought-through case against sex work, it’s just an anecdote dressed up in the feeling of disgust.

Finally, on a more personally petty note, for a book which casts itself as striking a bold claim for desire as fluid, identity as choice rather than innate quality, etc etc, where are all the bisexuals? Emke mentions bisexuals twice: once in the problematic list above, and once describing a lover as an attractive bisexual woman. That’s it. She seems to be completely unaware of a long tradition of bisexual writing on the very subjects in which she is most interested. Granted, a lot of that is in English, but Emke’s a journalist who works in English a lot of the time: it’s not as if this is inaccessible to her. That writing in English is not all from the US: there’s a whole book that arose from EuroBiCon in the 1990s.

On a more positive note, despite the fact that the book itself disappoints me, I want to note how much I appreciate that the English translation exists. As far as I know this edition, by Text Publishing, is the only English translation of what has evidently been quite a popular book in Germany. I can think of many uses for it - it could be used to broaden a contemporary sexuality studies course beyond the Anglo-American sphere, for instance, and to give anglophone native speakers access to primary source account of 80s youth experience in Germany. That an indie Australian press is investing not only in Australian authors but in broadening Australians’ access to texts from outside the Anglosphere is remarkable and exciting, my issues with this book’s perspectives aside.

Review will be posted to my blog after the archive date, and a link added then.

A journalist specialising in crisis zones reports from the front lines of her own shifting sexuality. As is often the case with such books, the people who would most benefit from reading this are the ones who almost certainly won't, and for those who have thought about these things much will be familiar. Still, there's the odd intriguing notion along the way. Most reliably interesting, though, was the most specific material - especially the story about meeting an obviously gay interpreter in Gaza, but the taboo on that there being such that it was very hard to tell whether anyone else knew, or indeed whether he knew himself. And I had no idea what a hypocritical mess the German sex laws had been post-war, and to an extent remain to this day.

How We Desire is a beautifully written with exquisite detail from extensive research. The pace is a lot slower than I usually like for my reads, and unfortunately I just couldn’t connect to the story but I really don’t think that this is because of the book. I’ve rated 4 stars as, although I didn’t particularly connect to the story, it’s still a work of pure beauty.

How We Desire by German author Carlin Emcke, is a memoir of self-discovery, love, desire, and sexuality. Through essay styled stories, the author explores how she developed the desire for the same sex. Starting out life like everyone else she was taught through interactions and experiences that liking men was the norm. The author does a fantastic job at articulating her experiences in a way that resonates with the reader. 

I want to thank Net Galley for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review. I found this book to be intruiguing and well written.