A Primer for the Body

Appeared in Creative Loafing in 2008

So you see this new book called How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry and you think, “Who the fuck is Adrian Colesberry? Furthermore, why would I want to fuck him?”

Then you see that the book is written by Adrian Colesberry and you begin to get the idea. The guidebook implied by the title is a little misleading. This is more of a sexual memoir, but even that doesn’t cut to the heart of the book. It’s a testament of love to written, written by a guy who worships and adores women.

And he’s not even a rake. Colesberry has been serially monogamous and has had only 11 partners in his nearly 40 years of life on earth.

But he does love women and loves having sex with them. So this sex-guidebook parody allows the author to use himself as a reference point. To his prospective partners, he offers suggestions on how to treat his penis, how to most effectively suck his cock and what parts of your body Adrian most wants to explore, which leads to the greatest chapter title of this still-young century, “Adrian and Your Asshole.’

He traveled an odd road to this point. Colesberry was for 14 years a biomedical engineer and now does stand-up comedy and extra work in film. His love life has also been a strange journey, including a dark and nearly celibate decade spent with the woman readers will come to know as The Wife. “We became close in too many ways that were not erotic,” Colesberry says. They became more like siblings, but he has crafted a great relationship with her since their divorce.

But for all of the sexual frustration of a cloistered marriage, he lived out his fantasies multiple times with women known as The Great One . . . The Enthusiast . . . The Expert . . . The Innocent . . . and finally, The Last One, the second woman to marry Adrian Colesberry.

Throughout this analysis of his dating and sex life, Colesberry remains an engineer, offering charts and statistical analyses of the time he spends sucking on the right nipple verses the time he spends with the left nipple in his mouth. Much like a scientist presenting a hypothesis, he projects his partner’s reaction to his offer to bathe her face in jism. He’s also quite open about his occasional erective and orgasmic issues.

All of this is written in third person – for example, “Adrian’s penis has manually operated functions and is designed for people who like to engage with a penis.” Considering the intimate nature of the subject and the scholarly – and at times clinical – nature of the material (extensive footnotes), this comes off a hilarious treatise on sexual relationships.

And it’s a marketing challenge. Does this get shelved with sex books or relationship books? Will people consider it – because of the explicit parts – an “adult book.” Funny as it is, Colesberry considers a place on the humor shelf to be “death.”

In the end, How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry is great satire – and might make for fun couples reading. In fact, Colesberry hopes that people might crawl in bed, read his book for a bit and toss it aside when the inevitable arousal occurs.

It just might work for you.