Review

The cougar pounces
- from theglobeandmail.com, By MARY-LOU ZEITOUN

Do not read Confessions of a Reluctant Cougar in an airport. Glittery pink text shouts the title over a photo of a sexy, beribboned stiletto. Men stare. Airports are sexually charged, people-watching havens to begin with and Myna Wallin's protagonist Olivia would have prowled them like a big cat at a watering hole.

In Confessions, Olivia, an actress in her fifties, details her encounters with younger men in Toronto. The men are second rate: cowardly, hypochondriac, pseudo-intellectual liars, but Olivia is drawn to their youth. Although this book strives for the same iconoclastic effect that Sex and the City had when Candace Bushnell's column first came out, Yorkville, David purses and Jimmy Choo shoes just don't hold the same sway that New York City luxury lifestyle did in the nineties. Confessions generally reads as a sort of Bushnell lite (yes it is possible), but with a slight smattering of a darker pathos.

"As Olivia tosses the tissue with the red imprint of her kiss on it into the trash she thinks 'this cougar thing is terribly underrated'... she looks at her reflection in the mirror and tries to smile, but somehow she just can't make the gesture."

Wallin has a credible and industrious background in the Canadian small-press literary scene and is an accomplished poet. She co-founded "believe your own press," which published award-winning chapbooks. She also co-organized the Small Press Book Fair, helped program and host the Art Bar Poetry Series and hosted CKLN's radio show In Other Words from 2004-2010.

Her first full-length poetry collection, A Thousand Profane Pieces (2006) was reviewed by George Elliott Clarke as "exhilarating: a dollop of sugar-coated acid ... Ms. Sylvia Plath Atwood: satire and cynicism for the discriminating reader."

Lines like "Fresh, unspoiled, tangle of black curls, eyes of a zealot" prove her to be an adept poet. But in Confessions Wallin's erotic rhythm is lost and her intention is never clear. Is she addressing love, sexism or sex? The point of view needlessly shifts between first and third person, and plays out in present tense, the currently popular "shopping list" voice of literature.

"Today Olivia has decided to clean out her shoe closet, tossing aside well-worn Manolos and Jimmy Choos to be taken to the local consignment store."

Nonetheless Wallin's litany of erotic experiences is, sadly, still an act of admirable bravery. Today, "cougar" as a label for older women who "prey" on younger men is a sexist, sneering and insulting term. Even though, from Khadijah to Collete, older women have happily partnered with younger men for millennia, and none of them were reluctant.

Mary-Lou Zeitoun is an author and journalist living in Toronto.