India, Jan. 20 -- Alyne Tamir's tongue-in-cheek memoir shines most when the author gives readers a peek into how faith shaped her ideas of sex and sexuality while she was coming of age. It also shows how the regressive and outdated ideas of sexual morality that she was raised with played a key role in her divorce. "I'd been raised with the message that bodies were to be hidden, that sex, and anything close to it, were absolutely forbidden till you were married," she writes. The secrecy around the act didn't make her excited about the sex she will eventually be 'allowed' to have.

More importantly, for Tamir, it felt as if her body wasn't her own. "It was almost as if my body was on loan to me, gifted with a complicated set of rules and co...