What if for just one year you explored everything you’d wondered about sex but hadn’t tried?

The project was simple: An attractive, successful magazine journalist, Robin Rinaldi, would move into a San Francisco apartment, join a dating site, and get laid. Never mind that she already owned a beautiful flat a few blocks away, that she was forty-four, or that she was married to a man she’d been in love with for eighteen years. What followed—a year of sex, heartbreak, and unexpected revelation—is the topic of this riveting memoir, The Wild Oats Project.

An open marriage was never one of Rinaldi’s goals—her priority as she approached midlife was to start a family. But when her husband insisted on a vasectomy, she decided that she could remain married only on her own terms. If I can’t have children, she told herself, then I’m going to have lovers. During the week she would live alone, seduce men (and women), attend erotic workshops, and partake in wall-banging sex. On the weekends, she would go home and be a wife.

At a time when the bestseller lists are topped by books about eroticism and the shifting roles of women, this brave memoir explores how our sexuality defines us—and it delivers the missing link: an everywoman’s account of sex. Combining the strong literary voice of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild with the adventurousness of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, The Wild Oats Project challenges our sensibilities and evokes the delicate balance between loving others and staying true to oneself.