By James R. Petersen

If it's true that fact always trumps fiction, what does that say when it comes to writing about sex? It takes a special gift to imagine a steamy love scene and compellingly put it on paper. Actually doing the deed yourself and then making it come alive for a reader -- now that's a real trick.

Recently, we named the 25 sexiest novels ever written. That feature got us to thinking about real-life erotica and inspired us to compile our choices for the 10 sexiest memoirs of all time. The accounts selected here share an eye for detail, an enthusiasm for the topic and a thirst for experience. The list includes actors and musicians as well as ingénues and art critics, all of whom bring new meaning to the term kiss and tell.

* Click on a cover to read about each memoir.

The gist:
A French woman loses her virginity and a week later discovers group sex.

Hot topics:
The author, a French art critic, rocked the world with this book, published in 2001. The recollections of a mature, wise woman, it is almost Nabokovian in its use of memory. It makes male sexual memoirs read like dog-eared black books or erotic Rolodexes. Instead of listing sexual episodes chronologically, Millet organizes her thoughts by topic (numbers, space) and some of her more pastoral descriptions make sex a form of Kodachrome. This may be the smartest book ever written on sex.

Sample passage:
On my back, I could be stroked by several men while one of them, rearing up to make room and to see what he was doing, would get going in my sex. I was tugged and nibbled in several places at once, one hand rubbing insistently around the available part of my pubis, another skimming broadly across my entire torso or choosing to stroke my nipples....

I took pleasure in this caressing more than in the penetrations, in particular when it was a penis trailed over the entire surface of my face or a glans that rubbed against my breasts. I liked to catch one in my mouth as it passed by, running my lips up and down it while another came and begged attention on the other side of my outstretched neck, before turning my head to take the newcomer. Or having one in my mouth and one in my hand. My body opened up more under the effects of this kind of stroking, which was relatively brief and could be renewed again and again, than in penetration itself.

Hot topics:
Published in 2004, this "erotic memoir" made the New York Times list of notable books, not to mention being excerpted in Playboy magazine. Bentley, a dancer for 10 years with the New York City Ballet, captures in loving detail and awe-inspiring language a single affair or, rather, a single type of sex. Reviewers compared her to Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. They should be flattered. What can you say about an author who confesses, "I came to know God experientially, from being fucked in the ass -- over and over and over again." This book touches erotic topics from lingerie to the ritual preparation of KY jelly to the learning curve involved in mastering fellatio: "Deep is good. Gagging is good. If you won't gag for your man, how can you really love him?"

Sample passage:
His was first. In my ass.

I don't know the exact length, but it's definitely too big -- just right. Of medium width, neither too slender nor too thick. Beautiful. My ass, tiny, a teenage boy's, tight, and tightly wound. Twenty-five years of winding as a ballet dancer.... Turning out the legs from the hips just winds up that pelvic floor like a corkscrew. I worked my gut all my life standing at that ballet barre. Now it is being un-worked.

His cock, my ass, unwinding. Divine.

As he enters me I let go, millimeter by millimeter, of the tensing, pulling, tightening, gripping. I am addicted to extreme physical endurance, the marathon of uncoiling intensity. I release my muscles, my tendons, my flesh, my anger, my ego, my rules, my censors, my parents, my cells, my life. At the same time I pull and suck and draw him inward. Opening out and sucking in, one thing.

Bliss, I learned from being sodomized, is an experience of eternity in a moment of real time. Sodomy is the ultimate sexual act of trust.

Hot topics:
Casanova was, at times, a priest, a lawyer, a con man, a patron of the arts, a horse thief, a gambler, a diplomat, a cabalist, but he is known for one thing, done repeatedly. His name entered the language as the benchmark for seduction and conquest. Guiding philosophy: "Is love anything else than a kind of curiosity? I think not...." He believes that everyone is available. His original sexual memoir is 12 volumes of the kind of behavior you see in Merchant Ivory films. Masked balls, beautiful costumes, cross-dressing, lace up the wazoo, flowery language, declarations of love, deception, honor, revenge -- in short, all the stuff of soap operas, without commercials. If you are over the age of 45 and read this, you will have one thought: You should have hit on a lot more women.

Sample passage:
[On bedding two sisters] I overwhelmed them with happiness for several hours, passing five or six times from one to the other before I was exhausted. In the intervals, seeing them to be docile and desirous, I made them execute Aretin's most complicated postures, which amused them beyond words. We kissed whatever took our fancy, and just as Hedvig applied her lips to the mouth of the pistol, it went off and the discharge inundated her face and her bosom. She was delighted, and watched the process to the end with all the curiosity of a doctor.

Hot topics:
Gee. Kids today. Kirkus called the author a "junior league Catherine M," which may be cause for war. Published when the author was 17, this adjective-laden diary was translated into 23 languages, selling more than a million copies. The title refers to the restorative value of grooming, not to a sexual act.

Sample passage:
I passed the tips of my fingers over his lips, slowly massaging them; then my fingers entered his mouth, gently, smoothly.... His moaning made me realize how exciting fingers might be in their journey of discovery. I placed a finger on my dripping rose, moistening it with dew, and then placed it on the coral tip of his stiff penis, which at the touch vibrated slightly in the air like the flag of a commander victorious in battle. Astride him, my buttocks turned toward the mirror and thus reflected in his eyes, I lowered my bosom and whispered "I want you" in his ear.

It was divine to see him at the mercy of my desires, stretched out naked on white sheets that received the outline of his tense, excited body. I took the scented scarf I was wearing when I entered the house, and I blindfolded him so that he could not glimpse the body I permitted him to serve.

I left him there quite a while. Too long. I was crazed with lust, I wanted to straddle that perennially erect shaft, and yet I also wanted to make him wait longer, to wait forever. Finally I rose from the kitchen chair to return to the bedroom where, bound, he was expecting me. He could hear my steps, deliberately quiet and stealthy, and he emitted a sigh of gratitude. He jerked before my body slowly swallowed him up inside it....

Hot topics:
This slight book, published in 1978 (a condensed version ran in Playboy magazine), chronicled a single fierce liaison. Unlike the best-selling Story of O -- the catalyst for a whole genre called "château porn" -- this account was the kind of deviant delight you could have in a rent-controlled apartment, with accessories from Bloomingdale's or your local riding shop. The book describes a domino theory of kinky sex -- of dominance and submission. "The first time we were in bed together, he held my hands pinned down above my head. I liked it." That opening gives way to scarves used as blindfolds and restraints. The lovers shop together -- he tests a riding crop on her thigh before shocked onlookers. He ties her hands, arms raised above her head, to a hook on the wall while he works. He dresses her as a man, and takes her from behind. He ties her to a table leg, and shares food; she gives him a blow job, turning it into a game: "He tried to see how long he could continue to eat calmly; I, how soon I could make him drop his fork and moan." The book made a remarkable movie in 1986 with Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. And prompted a run on riding crops, handcuffs, whips and chains.

Sample passage:
Muffled sounds come through the handkerchief, which is lodged way back in my throat and holds my tongue down flat.... He begins to rub oil into my neck and armpits. Everything in my brain is blocked out by the convulsive spasms in my muscles. He massages my breasts and I'm fighting for air.... Now there is oil on my stomach, a slow, insistent, rhythmic, circular motion.... He spreads my legs, which stretches me even more. I scream.... For the first time tonight he looks interested, fascinated even. His eyes are three inches from mine and something is moving very lightly up and down alongside my clitoris. His fingers are slippery with oil, drenched in oil, and in mid-scream my body shifts gear to the sounds -- not so dissimilar -- that it makes when I'm about to come and then I come.

He unties me, fucks me standing up, puts me to bed, bathes my face with a washcloth dipped in cold water from a white Tupperware bowl. He rubs my wrists for a long time. Just before I fall asleep he says, "You'll have to wear long sleeves tomorrow, sweetheart, what a nuisance, it's going to be a hot day."

Hot topics:
Published in France in 1967, translated into English and published by Grove Press in 1971, the book claimed to be an "autobiographical novel" by the wife of a diplomat in the French Foreign Service. More than Fear of Flying, Emmanuelle captured the weightless curiosity -- the pure permission -- of the sexual revolution. The heroine has interesting spontaneous sex in airplanes, restrooms, a massage parlor, an opium den, on squash courts and on a wicker chair on a balcony overlooking Bangkok. Caveat: The flow of pleasure is interrupted by a 60-page lecture on the ethics of eroticism, delivered by an aging gay sybarite. No work of fiction would waste the pages.

Sample passage:
Her bent fingers rose and fell, becoming less timid as they prolonged their caresses, no longer limiting themselves to elementary back-and-forth motions, but opening slightly, skillfully, to slide along the big, swollen vein of his arched penis (lightly scratching it with their filed nails), as far down as possible, as close to his testicles as the tightness of his trousers would permit, then rising again with lascivious twists. His member had grown so much that it seemed endless, but she finally reached its tip and covered it with the folds of loose skin in the hollow of her damp palm before beginning another downward journey, squeezing him tightly again, stretching his foreskin, alternately strangling his tumescent flesh and relaxing her grip on it, barely grazing it or tormenting it, massaging it in broad strokes or irritating it with quick, merciless little movements....

When his satisfied penis finally disgorged its semen in long, white, odorous spurts, she received it with strange exaltation along her arms, on her bare belly, on her throat, face, and mouth, and in her hair.... When she let her arm fall, he took hold of her clitoris with his finger tips and brought her to orgasm.

Hot topics:
My Life & Loves was one of the contraband books men brought home from Paris, an underground classic, the subject of court battles and government censorship. As much as any sex research by Masters and Johnson, it taught boys the importance of the clitoris, the charm of cunnilingus and the value of long, slow strokes. Read today, the book is a hilarious chronicle of turn-of-the-century hang-ups. There are quaint forms of birth control (a water-filled syringe after intercourse), odd names for orgasms ("he brought her to hysteria"), and even sex toys (the hedgehog -- a silver ring surrounded by feathers). After a wet dream and a subsequent bout of self-abuse, Harris tests himself on the athletic field and finds that he can't clear the high jump bar, at a height one inch lower than usual. "Why had I indulged so foolishly?" For the rest of the year, he ties a length of whipcord around his penis before going to sleep, and so recovers his athletic ability.

Sample passage:
My wild excitement made me shiver; I could have struck her for drawing away; but soon I noticed that she let my sex touch her clitoris with pleasure and I began to use my cock as a finger, caressing her with it. In a moment or two I began to move it more quickly, and as my excitement grew to the height, I again tried to slip it into her pussy, and now, as her love-dew came, I got my sex in a little way, which gave me inexpressible pleasure; but when I pushed to go further, she drew away again with a sharp cry of pain. At the same moment my orgasm came on for the first time and seed like milk spirted from my sex. The pleasure-thrill was almost unbearably keen; I could have screamed with the pang of it, but Jessie cried out: "Oh, you're wetting me...."

The gist:
German born actor travels the world, bedding everything that moves.

Hot topics:
Kinski appeared in 160 films, including Aguirre: the Wrath of God, Nosferatu and Fitzcarraldo. Sexually driven, he bedded his sister, prostitutes, actresses, journalists, giantesses, stewardesses, Israeli soldiers, the wives of directors, servants, makeup artists, salesgirls, waitresses, royalty, the pockmarked, the hirsute, the plump, the lithe, the frizzy haired -- all with the same energy. The lovers rattle by like the sprockets in a piece of film, propelling the story. At times the sex writing seems mechanical -- the sexual episodes could each fit on an index card -- but Kinski treats his film roles with the same brevity (it's not clear that he remembers the name of more than a handful of movies). He is madness in motion yet with an eye for detail that is unique. A woman's ass stares at him like "an order that has to be obeyed." With another lover: "I feel her orgasms like electric pulsations while I grow deeper and deeper into her like a root." And another: "The stiff little wads of her vaginal lips keep springing together like two halves of a rubber ball."

Sample passage:
She pulls off her panties and stands before me with open legs, protruding pelvis, and slightly bent knees. Her rough, swollen tongue fills my mouth. Her belly pushed against my dick as if she were knocked up. She moans. Her abdomen works like a machine. She shpritzes and shpritzes. Our knees buckle. I shove my dick into her from behind, right up to my nuts, and I writhe as if I were touching a high-voltage line -- while she, impaled, and with her tongue hanging out, rattles like a slaughtered calf.

The gist:
German actress stars in the underground classic Ecstasy, comes to America, changes her name to Hedy Lamarr, and discovers that sex is just as strange on this side of the Atlantic.

Hot topics:
Hedy Lamarr was smarter than Hollywood would ever realize (she co-invented the technology behind shared spectrum, the basis of modern cell phones). When this book came out, critics slammed her for the inclusion of sexual details from her life. But her candor worked to deconstruct Hollywood legend and mythmaking. The book opens with her waking in bed to discover her husband having sex with the maid. Later she escapes his jealous rage by running into a brothel, where she is mistaken for one of the staff. As she watches a sexual tableau through a peephole, a stranger takes her from behind. Once in America, a new husband has a wax replica made of her, and insists that she watch while he has sex with it. Perhaps the most haunting image is her recollection of the groundbreaking scene in Ecstasy, a film that ran in theaters for decades. The director shot more than 250,000 feet of film; crouching just off camera, he poked her buttocks with a pin to produce the appropriate facial expression. The sex, she said, went on and on, became genuine. Depending on which version of the scrap-spliced film is viewed, audiences might see true passion or exhaustion.

Sample passage:
[Watching a peasant girl in Mexico having sex with the spirit of Pancho Villa] She closed her eyes. Then she held her arms out as if welcoming someone. She began to breathe faster and pursed her lips as if she were kissing someone. Slowly her legs spread and she squeezed arms across her large tan breasts.

She was breathing hard now and almost imperceptibly began the rhythm of love -- back and forth she went, up and down. Her face was tensing, her body glistened with perspiration. Then she moaned -- you could see her muscles tighten. She held her breath, gasped for air. Then for a long time she just lay there while her breathing returned to normal. Finally she got up, wiped her whole body with a towel, and dressed.

The gist:
Boys form rock band and get laid.

Hot topics:
You've seen the honeymoon video, now read the book.

Sample passage:
[By Tommy Lee] Her name was Jessica and I thought she was sexy because she was a small part-Mexican girl with natural little titties, a funny smile and fat puffy cheeks. The first time we hooked up, I took her back to my van and within minutes started going down on her. She banged her fist on the wall and screamed, "Oh my God! I'm going to come!" I started licking her harder, and then all of a sudden she roared like some kind of desperate mountain lion and her pussy exploded. Water shot out everywhere. She was coming like a spilled tanker, and it was the coolest fucking thing I had ever seen in my life. I just thought, Oh my God, I love this girl. This is the one! Every day after rehearsal, I would pick her up in my van, we'd park somewhere quiet and she would squirt her shit everywhere. I loved to just sit there and let her come on me. Eventually my van started to stink. I drove my mom to the store one afternoon, and she kept asking what the smell was. I had to pretend like I didn't know.