“Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.”
The trysts that followed — and there were many of them — became the stuff of her widely read 2003 memoir, “A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance.” The subject of national attention if not titillation, Ms. Juska became a go-to interpreter of later-life desire, entertaining and perhaps inspiring readers with her spicy spirit.
Ms. Juska, 84, died Oct. 24 at a care facility in Chico, Calif. Her daughter-in-law, Mary Juska, confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.
Ms. Juska, a divorcée, said she was inspired to take out the personal ad by "Autumn Tale," a 1998 film by French director Eric Rohmer in which a woman turns to the newspaper to seek a companion for her middle-aged friend.
At the time, Ms. Juska estimated she had gone 30 years without sex, a drought due neither to lack of interest nor of effort on the dating scene.
"A deep-seated emotion — desire — unseated itself, rose up and began to knock insistently at the door of my sexuality," the San Francisco Chronicle quoted her as writing later. "I wanted to invite a man into my life. The problem was that, despite senior hikes, senior birdwatching, senior mixers, even a couple of senior dances at a church the doors of which I had not darkened in over fifty years, I couldn't find one."
Tired of waiting, she turned to the New York Review of Books, a venue that she hoped might attract intellectual men who shared her love of literature. The eminent literary review proved fertile ground: Ms. Juska reported receiving 63 replies from men ranging in age from 85 to 32 — but “a very old 32,” she told CBS News.
Some respondents were classier than others. One mailed a picture of himself wearing sunglasses and nothing else. Ms. Juska did not reply.
In all, the letters yielded eight or nine dates, which, in turn, yielded five sexual encounters, she said. Her suitors’ identities, if not their anatomy or habits, were safe with Ms. Juska; in her memoir, she changed their names and referred to them by such titles as “Danny the Priest, Jonah the Thief, Robert the Liar, Sidney the Peculiar and Graham the Younger.”
Like any dater, she had experiences running from the sublime to the less-than-sublime. In the latter category was Jonah, an 80-something, who traveled from the East Coast for their rendezvous at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, which ended with Jonah stealing Ms. Juska’s champagne flutes and silk pajama pants.
At least twice, she said, her heart was broken. “And I would like to say that that experience is no easier at 67 than it is at 17,” she told NPR. “It’s just at 67, one has less time to get over it.”
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“A Round-Heeled Woman” — the title referred to the old-fashioned name for a lady easily tipped into the horizontal position — became a one-woman play written by Jane Prowse and starring Sharon Gless, performed in San Francisco, Miami and London.
The story, however graphic, was about more than carnal pleasure, much in the same way, a book reviewer wrote in the San Jose Mercury News, that “ ‘Moby-Dick’ is about far more than a madman’s search for a whale.” Ms. Juska had revealed what too many people were missing.
“I have a girlfriend in the Midwest who said to me, ‘I want to hear all about the book, but I don’t want to hear about the sex,’ ” Ms. Juska told the National Post of Canada. “I think that’s because sex is a sad reminder to some people that they’ve been without it for so long.”
Jane Murbach was born March 7, 1933, in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Archbold, Ohio, where many of her neighbors were Mennonites. Her father was a doctor, and her mother was a homemaker.
Ms. Juska received a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Michigan in 1955. Her most recent book was a novel, “Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say” (2015), a takeoff on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
Ms. Juska moved to California in the early 1970s after divorcing from her husband, Joe Juska, whom she had married young, and with whom she said she had little emotional connection. “The loneliest I have ever been was when I was married,” she once told the New York Times.
She spent much of her career in California, teaching at San Quentin prison as well as in schools as she raised her son, Andy Juska of Chester, Calif.
Besides her son — whose permission she sought before placing her personal ad, but who, she joked, had “no intention of reading the book” about what came from it — survivors include a sister; and two granddaughters.
Ms. Juska struggled at times with obesity and addiction, which she discussed in her writing as candidly as she discussed her romantic life. In a sequel, called “Unaccompanied Women” (2006), she wrote of her sadness when Graham, a 30-something, married a younger lover.
“I am moved to tears with longing and love for this man,” she confessed, “with despair and regret for what cannot be.”
What she did not regret, she said, was having taken out the personal ad; she wished she had done it years earlier. And for those who wondered, she insisted that her allusion to Trollope, the English Victorian novelist, was not a pun.
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