The real life behind Helen Hunt's Oscar-nominated performance in The Sessions: "A provocative and unusual book about a provocative and unusual profession" (Booklist).
For the past forty years, Cheryl Cohen Greene has worked as a surrogate partner, helping clients to confront and ultimately accept their sexuality. In this riveting memoir, Cohen Greene shares some of her most moving cases, and also reveals her own sexual coming-of-age. Beginning with a rigid Catholic upbringing in the 1950s, where she was taught to think sex and sexual desires were unnatural and wrong, Cohen Greene struggled to reconcile her sexual identity.
In the 1960s Sexual Revolution, Cohen Greene found herself drawn to alternative sexual paths, and ultimately achieved a rich and rewarding career as a surrogate partner. Sex surrogacy as a profession was first developed by noted sex researchers Masters and Johnson in the 1960s, and since its inception has remained in the shadows. An Intimate Life offers a candid look into the personal and professional life of a surrogate partner, examining the cultural and emotional ramifications of pursuing something most people consider taboo.
The memoir opens with Cohen Greene's work with Berkeley-based poet and journalist Mark O'Brien, who was confined to an iron lung after contracting polio at age six. His short essay "On Seeing A Sex Surrogate" was adapted into the film The Sessions starring John Hawkes and Helen Hunt as Cheryl T. Cohen Greene. Cheryl Cohen Greene has been in private clinical practice as a surrogate partner and Consultant in Human Sexuality since 1973. She was trained in the Masters and Johnson modality and was on the training staff of San Francisco Sex Information for 19 years. Cohen Green is a certified Sex Educator and Clinical Sexologist, and in 2004 she earned her DHS (Doctor of Human Sexuality) from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. She is currently the Vice President of of IPSA (the International Professional Surro¬gates Association). She was one of the founders of BASA (the Bay Area Surrogates Association). Cohen Green is a frequent media guest, who has been interviewed on Larry King Live, the the National Geographic Channel, the WE Channel, and CNN, among others.
