Periel Aschenbrand / The 'sleep with anyone you want' guide to dating: How a year of one-night-stands led one woman to the man of her dreams

True love: Periel reveals how she met her now-husband, Guy, when she got drunk at a cousin's wedding and embarked on what she assumed would be nothing more than a dirty weekend

The 'sleep with anyone you want' guide to dating: How a year of one-night-stands led one woman to the man of her dreams

• Periel Aschenbrand, 37, from New York City, charts every embarrassing detail of her sexual escapades in her new memoir, On My Knees
• She believes that dating advice today is outdated and contrived, and that women should 'sleep with anyone you want, when you want'  

By ANNETTE WITHERIDGE
PUBLISHED: 17:05 BST, 14 August 2013 | UPDATED: 22:48 BST, 14 August 2013

When a beautiful fashion designer embarked on a crazy year of one-night stands, the last person she expected to meet was the man of her dreams.

Periel Aschenbrand / Knee Deep

PERIEL ASCHENBRAND, KNEE DEEP

By Royal Young

Published June 18, 2013

Periel Aschenbrand’s latest memoir, On My Knees (It Books), is a raunchy, raucous, hilarious ride. Aschenbrand, who grew up Jewish in Queens, recounts her neurotic Israeli mom and more laid-back father in loving and unflinchingly funny detail. Yet this is more than a lightly humorous family fable. Aschenbrand has a dark, self-destructive side, too; and the book follows her chain-smoking journey through loneliness, lovers, and countless Law and Order reruns. She recounts a fun, flirty—but ultimately sort of sad—night partying with Philip Roth and writes vulnerably yet boldly about fucking up. What results is a self-deprecating but strong wisdom, a self-knowledge only those of us who have lived with ourselves at rock bottom can achieve. Brave, smart, sexy, and sharp, Aschenbrand is an expert at writing her life as a tantalizing striptease.

Periel Aschenbrand / If Jenny Saville and Lucien Freud had a Cannibal Baby (or a Love Child)

If Jenny Saville and Lucien Freud had a Cannibal Baby (or a Love Child)

By PERIEL ASCHENBRAND

I was introduced to Brooke by a mutual friend, who just happens to be an editor at Vogue. She said I had to meet her. I am constantly being told that I have to meet someone or other and being that I am mildly anti-social, I usually just nod and offer some bullshit variation of “I’d love to,” and pray no one will remember.

However, when the introducing party is an editor at Vogue, one generally pays attention.

So I went to meet Brooke, for pizza.

Periel Aschenbrand / Obsessions

Obsessions

By PERIEL ASCHENBRAND

Photography by Zollo

I’ve never thought about writing a self portrait before, which is funny considering the only thing I ever write about is myself. Truth be told, I didn’t even know you could write a self portrait. I thought you had to paint or draw or photograph it. But once I got started, I realized that I could go for hours and hours like this. I get to just go on about my favorite topic...myself.

Full disclosure: As someone who writes humor, it’s really easy to be self deprecating and, as such, get away without revealing too much about myself. Which is to say that even though I’m writing about myself, I usually think of myself as a character rather than really as, well, me.

But this is supposed to be different. As such, I’ve tried to be as revelatory and honest as possible and simultaneously not come off like a totally pretentious asshole. The results are questionable.

Periel Aschenbrand II

Periel Aschenbrand

Periel Aschenbrand II (The Bat Segundo Show #505)

Periel Aschenbrand is most recently the author of On My Knees. She previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #7.

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Author: Periel Aschenbrand

We talk with Periel Aschenbrand, one of Bat Segundo’s very first guests, for the first time in eight years, to discuss her latest memoir, ON MY KNEES, thank you notes, being introduced to Philip Roth as a “great writer,” judging other people, demonizing relatives in a book, and dental hygienists who may have killed their spouses.

Sex, Spider-Man and the hubris of being a writer

Periel Aschenbrand

Sex, Spider-Man and the hubris of being a writer

Sarah Bruni, Adelle Waldman, Alissa Nutting and Periel Aschenbrand talk about writing in very few words

TEDDY WAYNE

JUNE 25, 2013 4:00AM (UTC)

Sarah Bruni, Adelle Waldman, Alissa Nutting and Periel Aschenbrand are the authors of four hot summer reads — three debut novels and a memoir. "The Night Gwen Stacy Died," by Bruni, is a strange love story about an Iowa teenager and a man who calls himself Peter Parker and her Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man’s girlfriend). Waldman’s "The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P." chronicles the romantic misadventures and status anxieties of the titular protagonist, an up-and-coming writer in Brooklyn. "Tampa," Nutting’s second work of fiction, is a ripped-from-the-tabloids tale of a female teacher’s seduction of her young male student. And Aschenbrand’s memoir "On My Knees" is — well, just read it. I interviewed them as a group with a number of verbal restrictions on some of their answers:

Without summarizing the plot in any way, what would you say your novel is about?

Sarah Bruni: The Midwest. Spider-Man. Identity-borrowing. Adolescence.  Fugitives falling in love. Formative acts of reading.

I should have slept with Philip Roth

Philip Roth

I should have slept with Philip Roth

"Would you like to taste one of my cherries?" the great writer asked me, flirtatiously. And then I blew it

PERIEL ASCHENBRAND
JULY 1, 2013 4:00AM (UTC)

Excerpted from "On My Knees"

One of the perks of my job -- I got to go to really interesting events and meet really interesting people all the time. Some people were more interesting than others, of course, and I'd learned that meeting people you admire is often a bummer. They are generally shorter, fatter and uglier than you imagined, but that's neither here nor there.

In this particular scenario, I was being introduced to Philip Roth, my mother’s favorite writer, whom I had heard her refer to as “the literary lion.” And while I’ve never been particularly starstruck, I flipped when I found out Roth was going to be there. Next thing I know, a mutual friend takes me by the hand, drags me over to Roth, and introduces me to him in this fashion: “Philip. Zis is Periel, she is a grrrreat writer.”

I could not imagine anything more humiliating in the entire world. I wanted to curl up in a hole and die. Adding insult to injury, a friend of Roth’s who was lingering around us, nodded toward Roth and said to me, “So you like him, huh?”

In attempt to salvage whatever miserly bit of self-respect I had left, I said, “Well, I don’t know him, so I can’t like him, but I do like his work.”