A Collection of 6 Novels by Jacqueline Gay Walley

 Release Date: October 5, 2021

Strings Attached

BOOK 1 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION

Re-release from University Press of Mississippi, 1999

In her first novel, Gay Walley weaves into a seamless narrative - a woman’s quest for love, and the drunken, vagabond childhood she endured with her father. Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. When she grows up, she longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and to crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her drought of affection?

To Any Lengths

BOOK 2 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION

The “I” is a woman who is deliberating getting married to her boyfriend and is frightened. Her childhood has made her distrust union. She has a friend who has just gone to jail for growing marijuana. He has been a war hero, an artist, is good looking, a womanizer. She begins to visit him, because he is trapped like she is, and he gives her advice on love and herself. She begins to listen. He is the one who is “free” to her. In listening to him, she begins to itemize her own crimes in love. She marries her boyfriend, out of friendship, but the marriage feels doomed to her because the prisoner’s mind is lodged inside her. She has to come to where she belongs and what is true freedom and true love to her.

Prison Sex

BOOK 3 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION

This is a book about longing and how three people have to break through their respective prisons. David, a man, in actual prison for growing marijuana longs for her and has to deal with being in prison. Peter, her husband, is in the prison of not being loved enough by a wife who is obsessed with freedom. And Mira, the wife, feels that marriage is a prison for her and only being herself will make her free. She creates a situation where they all get to break their binds.

The Bed You Lie In

BOOK 4 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION

This is a story of an anguished love affair between two adult children (Arieh and Mira) of holocaust survivors who cannot get their parents’ pain out of themselves. But his anger, his volatility leads her to a kinder gentler Englishman, Michael. However, she cannot accept his goodness, nor what appears to be a dullness compared to the wildness of Arieh. They become involved in a triangle and the seemingly cuckolded man goes mad and wants to punish the woman with a vengeance that is almost Nazi-ish. She takes it because she feels she deserves it, having been treated badly by her survivor mother, although she doesn’t deserve this kind of rage. But she knows it is born of pain, a pain familiar to her. She knows shet has to confront her past. “’It’s because of me,’ Arieh said, ‘that you don’t want to be alone anymore.’ And maybe that was true. I had had to confront myself with him. The messiness of it, all that need that welled up in me. It had nearly killed me but not sublimating those needs had freed me to be real, to desire.” These two understand each other’s backstory and what has made them impossible in love, till they finally break through and she can purchase a new bed to lie in and live in her truth.

Write, She Said

BOOK 5 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION

The title harkens back to Duras’ novel and film, “Destroy, she said”. Mira, the main character, a writer, has a kind of magical realism experience with these two 20th century writers who come back to life as she steps through a mirrored glass to meet Jean Rhys in a bar and Marguerite Duras on a park bench. With ethereal credit cards they whisk her off to Vienna to heal that Jewish heritage, to teach her about life, love and writing, and to open her to new love with an oboe player. It’s as though they want her to know that love comes and goes, experiment, don’t be afraid, but all the while keep perfecting the craft of the writing, what Walley exudes as, “The private lives of sentences.”

Magnetism

BOOK 6 OF THE VENUS AS SHE AGES COLLECTION

A woman over sixty wants her sexuality, her eros back. It opens with the main character going on a date alone, walks herself along the High Line in New York, shops for a book at The Strand and goes to hear Mahler. She remembers the past when she had that juiciness, and she finds lovers in the present, but something is amiss. She has a friendship with a female holocaust survivor who lives upstairs, who has that eros, even over 80, just in her being. The older woman dies, but in the lessons she leaves behind, the narrator finally finds that eros within her attitude toward life.