Apples & oranges

by Jan Clausen

After more than a decade of "marriage" to a woman with whom she was raising a daughter, Jan Clausen fell in love with a man, stunning herself and the lesbian community to which she had been intimately connected. The experience was, she writes, "like deliberately embarking on a sea cruise off the edge of a flat Earth." In her luminous and affecting memoir, Clausen charts the trajectory of her sexual life - from her first kiss to her later loves - and offers a stinging critique of society's insistence on yoking identity to desire. In the 1950s Pacific Northwest, Clausen grew up in a family in which premarital sex, swearing, and spicy foods were verboten. In the sixties, she embraced the heterosexual revolution, consorting with various adolescent Lotharios and failing miserably in her effort to become a topless dancer during a summer break from Reed College. But it was amid New York's dynamic lesbian milieu in the 1970s that she "crossed the pass of love" and fell for Leslie Kaplow, also