Modeled on an anonymous tale, Woemens Worth or A Treatise proveinge by sundrie reasons that Woemen doe excell men, the prose streams forward, undaunted by constraints, be they societal or grammatical.

On its pages, a wife is free to bare her innermost thoughts:

A tongue hits your eye, slug-wet and heavy. Your husband strips away the recalcitrant sheet wound about your legs and nudges, insistently, his knee between your thighs. He must make love on his own terms, which isn’t often. You usually make love in the mornings to take advantage of his hardness upon waking. Cole’s penis often doesn’t feel hard enough, as if it’s thinking of something else. (p. 16)

Passions held turgid under the surface finally begin to be released with the heat of Marrakesh. The inner and the outer converge and dance heady, naked, in thawing lakes:

Have you ever acted, as an adult, exactly as you wished? You’ve been battened down for so long; the good teacher, friend, wife. And you’re most passive in bed, all surrender and wanting to please so much. Your fantasy life has never leaked into your real life. But in bed, now alone, possibility is putting its key in the lock, like a stream of desert light in the morning, luring you out. (p. 112)

Soul-searching questions and examinations of the most prized possessions, our beliefs about immutable relationships, are swathed in the immediacy of fantasy, wantonness, willfulness and an almost impossible innocence.

The only false note is the ending, where birth seems to give way to absolution of past sins: the slate wiped clean, by milky white leavings. The Myth of Motherhood was never stronger.

But even still, the author writes with honesty and accuracy about the largely unexplored mother-daughter tug-of-war:

Your mother’s words mean nothing to you now, they’re the same phrases over and over again and they lost, years ago, the capacity for any sting. Of course you’ve said I love you to her in the past, but she never seems convinced … You fear you’ll have this situation with your mother until one of you dies, this feeling that you’ve engaged in combat with her, you’re not allies. You have to get away from the viciousness in her voice, the jab of her finger in the air, the fury in her face … Leaving without goodbye. It’s not the first time you’ve done this. (p. 281)

The Bride Stripped Bare leaves nothing, and everything, to the imagination.