Unnerving, thrilling, scary. These words define a few of the emotions the reader will experience. A woman seeks help in therapy. Her mind, emotions, actions are dictated by sex. Seeking help in therapy she becomes the experiment herself. The therapist is intrigued and somehow drawn to this patient , who brings her clock to time and record the sessions. It is a ride not to be missed. If you have ever wondered what therapy is like , here is an insight you will not forget.

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley!

The book is well-written and easy to follow. It's not often you find a book that covers the female character having a "sex addiction" or similar, so i was very intrigued by the summary. I absolutely loved this book.

I'd definitely recommend this to my friends.

This book was unfortunately not for me. Natalia and her therapist both felt two-dimensional to me, and the explicit sexual references felt like they were more for shock value rather than for making a point.

I thought this book was going to be a super cool page-turner, and it just fell completely flat for me. I wasn't feeling the writing style at all, and I just couldn't even handle the all of the strange metaphors. I DNF.

This book was unfortunately not for me. Maybe it was not an easy ready at the time I was looking for one!

Overall, I felt kinda meh about this book. Not necessarily bad, but not particularly memorable either. Giving it 2.5/5 Stars.

The story follows a woman named Natalia as she seeks therapy for sex addiction. Her new therapist jumps on the chance to help this unique and colorful client, and to share with her a method she has been working on since her PhD. From there their relationship tests the boundaries of an ethical professional relationship and the strange but strong bond they seem to feel with each other.

Honestly this book wasn’t a favorite. Not to say it was bad, but the writing was so clinical and detached (which makes sense since it was written from the therapist’s perspective on their sessions) which made it very hard for me to get into. Overall I think the book was trying too hard to be literary and deep, but the story underneath that was compelling and I never knew what to expect out of Natalia!

The book My Friend Natalia by Laura Lindstedt is narrated by a therapist about their patient who they call ‘Natalia’ who is hypersexual. Natalia starts therapy due to preoccupation with sex. Natalia’s therapy sessions are like story telling and she encourages her therapist to tell her story. This book is definitely not for everyone and left me with many unanswered questions. #MyFriendNatalia #NetGalley

This book was fascinating and strange, but I'm not sure it was for me. It feels a little...much. As in, at some points it felt like the writing was provocative or salacious just for the sake of getting a rise out of the reader, which made me fail to understand what I was supposed to glean from the book. It was definitely an entertaining read, though.

Published in Finland in 2019; published in translation by W.W. Norton & Co./Liveright Publishing on March 23, 2021

My Friend Natalia is a novel of therapy, told from the perspective of an unnamed therapist whose gender is never explicitly identified (I’ll call the therapist “she” for the sake of convenience). Natalia is the therapist’s patient. Her name probably isn’t Natalia; she encouraged the therapist to tell her story so the therapist is apparently preserving confidentiality when she says “Let’s call her Natalia.” As the title suggests, the therapist comes close to crossing professional boundaries, although it’s not entirely clear that she really regards Natalia as a friend. She does, however, allow Natalia to masturbate on her office couch during one of the therapy sessions, which is a pretty friendly thing to do. Natalia makes clear that she has a sexual attraction to her therapist, but it isn’t unusual for Natalia to feel a sexual attraction to the people in her life.

Natalia is pursuing therapy to address her obsession with sex. It’s all she ever thinks about. Sex is interesting, so Natalia’s stories about her sex life are interesting. They aren’t particularly titillating, so My Friend Natalia doesn’t work as porn, notwithstanding two impressive sketches of a penis and vagina that Natalia creates for her therapist. Nor are they particularly enlightening, as I doubt that Natalia’s personal experiences can be generalized in a productive way. The therapist draws conclusions — “Natalia went through both men and words as a way of masking her own vulnerability” — that might be more insightful than Natalia’s stories of sexuality unbound.

The therapy sessions are based on story-telling exercises, in which Natalia must invent stories that incorporate key words provided by the therapist. Natalia is loquacious. Her stories cover the chosen words like spilled water, flowing along multiple paths, seemingly at random, one element giving birth to a tangent that flows seamlessly into another. Natalia begins a story with a pornographic comic that she encountered in her childhood, then veers into a lecture on Sartre’s view of women as holes, discusses cinematic technique, and relates memories of her father peeling potatoes before she explains how her discovery of a woman’s buried body turned out to be something quite different .She discusses feminism. She ponders whether it is better to be a head without a body or a body without a head (she chooses the latter because a head can’t masturbate).

Laura Lindstedt’s prose is graceful and imaginative. I enjoyed her description of an erection as “a plea for the waiting to end.” Still, I think it likely that the novel’s meaning eluded me. A fair amount of attention is paid to a work of art hanging on the therapist’s wall called “Ear-Mouth,” a work that once belonged to Natalia’s grandmother. It disturbs her to see it on the therapist’s wall. It disturbs the therapist that Natalia perches an alarm clock on her belly during the sessions, keeping her own track of time. What does any of that mean? I don’t have a clue. Some of the story’s moments are sufficiently bizarre that they amuse, but I imagine there is more to the story than amusement. The ending sort of trails away. As is generally true of talk therapy, no obvious self-awareness ensues, although Natalia claims to have changed. Perhaps my inability to give My Friend Natalia more than a middling recommendation is my fault, but I can only bring what I have to the table, and what I have is confusion.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

There was a lot to this that I didn't grasp, the title for instance, why would the therapist refer to their patient in such a familiar way? Otherwise who else might be speaking, Natalia's alter ego? On the surface, this story seems simply to be narrated by a psychoanalyst about their patient Natalia, who seems to be suffering from years of hypersexualism. But, there are underlying issues; for example the psychotherapist's having been denied membership into the Finnish Association of Pyschoanalysis. I wondered if that had anything to do with their allowing Natalia to masturbate to completion during session. There was an ongoing and very nuanced theme of countertransference, and a therapist's susceptibility to becoming deeply involved in a client's story.

In reading My Friend Natalia, I learned a lot that I wasn't particularly interested in learning. For example that hamedori porn is directed by a male sex actor, bukkake porn involves many masturbating men on one woman, futanari porn has to do with hermaphrodites, and candaulism involves a man exposing his female partner (or her photos) to others. And then what I wanted to know, I was ultimately denied. Did Natalia's mother cause her lifelong trauma via suprapubic puncture? And why was it inflicted beyond the prescribed age of 2 years? Why the ambiguity about the therapist's gender?

Well, I honestly don't know how to review this in a way that will be acceptable given the subject matter. It's the internal monologue of a therapist and the documentation of the therapeutic sessions with a female patient with, shall we say, issues. It's not erotica although there are explicit spots (and then there's the drawings). There are all sorts of musings and, to be honest, intellectual arrogance. I admit to flipping through this more than reading it after the first 20 percent because I was more curious than engaged. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. It wasn't my cup of tea but fans of literary fiction might want to give it a try.

“As tension percolates, the therapist can’t shake the question: What does Natalia really want?”

WARNING...
IT MIGHT NOT BE WISE TO READ THIS BOOK IN PUBLIC....ha... or to your children.....

The Therapist tells us:
“Natalia began to tell me what was bothering her. Her lovers were the most vexatious of her problems, just as they were the very salt of her life, the sugar, the marzipan, the umami. ‘They are gone, but they are still in my head’, she said’”.

Natalia worked with a team of graphic designers at a midsize PR company.
She loved her work and wanted to develop herself, both professionally and—primarily—in her private life, to improve herself.

Natalia confesses to her therapist that she thinks about sex all the time and that’s her problem.
“The act forces its way into my mind like a tumor, and I am lost. I’ve contemplated chemical castration, anti-androgens, and I’ve even considered suicide. I know
‘in theory’ what constitutes a healthy sex life, what a healthy relationship is like, but I am able to use those insights about as well as I can play the piano”.

Says the therapist:
“Something flared within me, and it wasn’t merely sympathy, the emotion I feel for most of my clients. It was more like a sudden experience of harmony, wholly inappropriate given the circumstances”.
“When Natalia started to cry, I had a potent sense that I was in the presence of beauty”.

“Right away I knew that here I had the kind of client I had been waiting for all my life. This suffering individual might benefit from a method I developed in association with my mentor and which I fervently defended in my PhD, which received a grade of cum laude approbator, no less”.

The therapist felt an urge to take Natalia in his arms, but of course he didn’t.
Because he’s such a man of pure integrity?....hm???

Ok... getting real here...
I started laughing like crazy while reading “My Friend Natalia”.
The absurdity of the sessions had me giggling silly!
I mean Natalia brought an alarm clock to the sessions to call ‘time’ when ‘her’ sessions were over.
Oh my goodness gracious—all I could notice were the egos in the room—and the control competition between patient and therapist.

I kept reading - amused - as the pornography discussion exercises continued....
which Natalia says “left her with shocking amounts of excess energy”.
So much so — she couldn’t sleep?/!...
I was thinking...”might her sleep disorder be examined too?”...
I tell you — I was laughing hard...
not sure I was reading this book like a Good Samaritan— rather ....
I was playing - and goofing off with the experience of the writing ....

Natalia was a kick!!!!
She told her therapist that she was apparently “crazily serious” about their work together.
Me > I thought they were both just plain crazy....
But I had fun...
cracking myself up — reading the entertaining cerebral hogwash.
Page after page I wanted to analyze Natalia and the therapist > both of them.

There was hilarious mind-f...ing pretentious dialogue about Simone de Beauvoir,
Jean Paul Sartre....
and repressed childhood erotic memories.

There’s funny sentences...
“Well, well, there seem to be no limit to Natalia’s mental gyrations! Of course, ‘we’ weren’t getting anywhere, though she claimed otherwise”.
“Natalia had prepared for our sessions like a star pupil. She couldn’t help herself saying ‘ta-daa’, couldn’t help herself beating her drum in an almost regal procession of her sentences. So certain she was of herself, of her arrival, her success”.

Who was twisting who around their little finger?

Well... Natalia wins!!!
She drew a full page penis and handed it to the therapist. (giving us a full size view of her erect drawing too)..
AND THAT’S WHY NOT TO READ THIS BOOK IN PUBLIC

If readers hadn’t tossed the book out the window - after the black & white genitalia full page sketch—of the penis...
Then I assume they were enjoying themselves—with this translated novel.... enough to keep reading.
I did.....
...keep reading....
after the shocker-male-member drawing.
I admit to being one of those readers enjoying the entertainment.

Many readers will simply trash - toss - or burn this novel.
Stories of incest didn’t shock either the therapist or Natalia....
but clearly not all readers will be interested in reading about sex.... and/or intellectual holier-than-thou sanctimonious superiorities.

However, the cultured elegance - haha- of the therapy sessions tickled my funny bones.
It’s not like I was getting aroused but I found it quite fun - to engage in the dialogue of fantasies, and ideal eroticism.

Thank you Netgalley, Laura Lindstedt, and translator David Hackson.

This book will not be for everyone. It is told from the perspective of an unnamed therapist who is recounting her experience treating a patient named "Natalia" who suffers from sex addiction. The book is a week by week account of the treatment, and how Natalia begins to manipulate the therapist and her sessions.

Provocative at times simply for the sake of being provocative, "My Friend Natalia" failed to move me or teach me anything. The writing is stunning at times, with beautiful prose and imagery, but there is also a giant picture of a penis that comes up out of nowhere, and as someone who likes to read in public, perhaps this is not necessary. I did not enjoy this book, though I recognize that it simply isn't for me, and I would not begrudge anyone who decided to read it.

I had no idea what to expect from this, being that I’ve never read a novel translates from the Dutch. Overall, I didn’t enjoy this as much as I would have hoped, based on the plot summary. I felt like the sentences were completely disjointed (maybe just the fault of the translation) and there was a over-abundance of metaphors! The characters were very one-dimensional—not compelling to me, at all. It was a very strange book, and I can’t say I’ve ever read anything like it, but I’m also not really sure I want to.

The book is an interesting experiment. It takes place over therapy session. It’s an unorthodox idea but one that’s well worth reading. I highly recommend it

I absolutely loved this book. The form and structure are unique and invigorating, and the prose itself is fun and exciting. I really admire books that go experimental and sidestep the conventions of fiction, so this novel really delivers. Highly recommend, especially if you want something that breaks norms established in a lot of commercial and literary fiction.