Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm Megan O'Rourke, Slate's Culture Critic, and joining me today are Katie Roifie, a cultural critic and professor at NYU, and Troy Patterson, Slate's TV critic.

Hi.

Hi.

Hi.

So today we are very excited for us to discuss Gay Talese's

book, Thy Neighbor's Wife, which is billed on the back as the provocative classic work newly

updated. It's his 1981 panoramic cultural history of sex in America, which concentrates mostly on the sexual revolution

of the 1960s and 70s, but goes far back in time to the sort of origins of how sex was thought

of in America and Puritanism and extends to the present time as Thalise is writing it.

It's a really remarkable book, but for a lot of reasons that I'm hoping we'll get into,

one of which is that by the end of it, Talies has become both subject and observer in this work.

And it's worth noting for those listeners who don't know that Thalise, of course,

was part of the kind of new journalism movement of the 60s,

and we'll talk a little bit more about that and what that means and what

that meant to this work in particular. But to get us started, Katie and Troy, what do you,

this was a very controversial book when it came out, and we'll get into that too. But what do we

make of this book 30 some years after its publication? What strikes you? Well, having set up the question so beautifully, should we just treat that as a way to tease the reader while we pay the bills here while I read this ad?

Brilliant.

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