A Successful Woman's Life In Two Parts

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That’s me — the small-town girl with a big-city life. My story is the all-American one:  have a dream; believe in yourself; use your brain; develop street smarts; and make it happen, no excuses. My mantra has always been: good things will come to me, if I follow these simple rules. They did come to me; many times, and this exhilarating trend continues today in my life.

Building an $11 million consumer-focused marketing business and three retail stores brought me to the attention of the folks at Victoria’s Secret. I was featured on the front page of the NYTimes Business section and in USA Today.

At age 45, I was on top of my game. My career at Victoria’s Secret was rich and rewarding. The world was my oyster, as I flew around the globe conducting business in one world capital after another. I’d lived for eight years with a handsome, sexy man, with two wonderful children, who I adored and vice versa.

If you met me on the road of life, you would say: “That woman has everything going for her.”

I did — in some respects.

Darkness in the Details of Everyday Life

When I first wrote this manuscript for this very rich man starting a new publishing company called True Courage Press, the next words to flow from my keyboard focused on a history of strange illnesses. Now those words bore me and take the focus off of you — the object of my desires.

Like many of you who read me here at Anne of Carversville, there is also a dark side to my story.

Today I understand why my immune system has malfunctioned three times over three decades. In each case, at 28, 32 and 45, I found myself dramatically ill with different symptoms that we now believe were part of the same “disease”.

Only in my last debilitating illness, did I finally discover the real reasons for my health emergencies. The diagnosis alone of my 1995 medical condition cost $32,000, It was only my last doctor, Thomas M. O’Dorisio MD, then at Ohio State University, who accurately understood the problem.

“Guilt and self-loathing, connected to the patient’s ongoing life pattern of paving over significant emotional and psychological potholes” are not words that doctors write on their diagnosis pad.

In my case, Dr. O’Dorisio wrote “extreme stress” and “unusually high” next to my cortisol levels. “It’s anticlimactic, I know,” Dr. ‘Odo’ counseled me, “given the dramatic physical illness you’re experiencing.”

Smiling Damsel In Distress

Not really. This was far better than illness number one, when the doctor hospitalized me on the spot. Terrified I asked “Am I going to live?”  With an honest, take-no-prisoners bedside manner, he murmured eyeball to eyeball: “I can’t answer that question. “

The good doctor didn’t have to beat around the bush. I snuck down the hall and listened to him when he called the hospital.  I was hemorrhaging from the waist down, my spleen was begging for surgery and my white blood count was off the charts.

“Why did you not go to the emergency room Saturday night?” he demanded of me late Monday afternoon.

Convinced I could remedy the problem, I stayed in bed with my feet on pillows all weekend. Trust me when I say that I now have sense in my head, when the topic is the ravages of chronic stress on our bodies.

I was getting a divorce from a very abusive husband, who had met me at my new apartment to review separating the cutlery, while I threw my clothes into a suitcase. Covered in massive bruises and thinking I had 48 hours to live, I really didn’t care who got the meat cleaver.

Actually better him than me at that moment.

Superb in business, I’m a pushover in a marital divorce settlement. I only drew the line when my husband demanded the piano.  “But you don’t play the piano,” I tried to reason with him. “I auditioned for Julliard.” 

The logic wasn’t persuasive.  

Reminding myself to never again go out with a man whose office phone line somehow became intertwined with my own — so that his friends and business colleagues told him “whoever she is, you had better meet her” — I explained that I paid for every cent of the piano besides being the one who played it. 

Facing the reality that with only hours to live, it didn’t really matter what color lipstick I took the hospital, I breezed past him with the suggestion that he take all the kitchen knives and just please, please get out of my life.

In the hospital for eight days, surrounded by more charts and intense observation than any single dying woman deserves, I called Minnesota. It seemed wise, just in case I had to be buried or anything. BG couldn’t be trusted to put my ashes anywhere glorious like Central Park or the Atlantic Ocean. 

My divine remains would probably end up in some urn on the piano, leaving my soul to listen to him accuse his next three wives of gross infidelity while he screwed all the babes in their social circle. Thankfully women became more liberated in the seventies, and affairs could occur at work, rather than in the neighborhood. 

Indeed, my three closest women friends all screwed my husband, leaving me with a gender perspective that’s a bit more egalitarian about fault, when the tears start flowing. 

The good news is that I lived and also got my piano. Life was good, and I was on the mend once and for all.

As for what went wrong, my doctor sat on my bed saying “I am so embarrassed to say that we have no idea what made you so critically ill. But you are fine now.

It occurred to me for years that my body just checked me into the hospital for some reason. With such dramatic symptoms, people hovered around me nonstop. I had flowers, balloons on my bed, and for one week, no one abused me.

It was the first time in my life that I went a week without reliving the truth of what a disappointing, disgusting failure of a person I was. All bruises came from inside my body, rather than being delivered in hand to hand psychological combat.

Babe Under Wraps

In those days I didn’t have the enviable looks of a woman “of a certain age”.

Let me do the quick laundry list, one that you might recognize: overweight, bad nutrition, no exercise, totally stressed out with air-tight explanations of why I couldn’t make any significant lifestyle changes because I was too busy. 

At 5’8” and blessed with an 8” wrist — truly large-boned, which is every woman’s excuse for excess weight — I had spent most of my life as a size 12-14. At 232 pounds for about a year in my mid-20s, I was in size 16, in a state of agony and total disgust with myself.

Never thin, a 60 pound weight gain in five-years, without being pregnant or chronically ill made no one responsible but myself.

This was perhaps a year before my father called me totally intoxicated from Pittsburgh or similar place one night. Could he fly into Buffalo the next day to have lunch with me? When we saw each other for the first time in about six years at the airport, neither of us recognized each other.

He was now a silver fox and I was a bloated version of myself.

Manhattan Limelight

My second illness didn’t require hospitalization but put me on prednisone for two years.

A doctor would never prescribe the drug for two years today, but it was a miracle drug then. Suffering from a catch in my knee that had me nearly bedridden in a week of progressive, inexplicable physical degeneration, I was happy to start swallowing eight tablets of prednisone and be back on the road.

The scale dropped 70 pounds at age 33, and for one year my clothes said ‘size 6’. I was off the prednisone finally and determined to turn my life into gold. The details of these years belong in other chapters, because this is a sendoff chapter about getting you on the road to my Superyoung Smart Sensuality life perspective. 

Lucky In Bed


Sexual dysfunction befriends women of every weight, and I was a lucky one who missed its grip.

Good sex has been a key element in my life for decades and even in bad relationships. Long rebellious on matters of sexual liberation, I believe my embrace of positive sexuality helped to offset the downside of other self-destructive behavior patterns.

Without my health problems surfacing in full-blown, unyielding diva drama at a pivotal point in my life in 1995, I would have continued my own life charade indefinitely.

It seems to me that we tell-all, self-help-driven American women have a unique gift for always seeking answers to the problems we refuse to confront, when they are staring us in the face.

My sexual “good luck” doesn’t prevent me from emphasizing with the full range of psychological, emotional, and physical difficulties you might be experiencing right now.

If connection is the first step to inspiration, then I hope to convince you that you, too, can — and must — get around your own roadblocks. They are most assuredly bigger than mine, but few situations have no resolution.

Looking for Potholes

Like me, you must stop paving over the big and small craters in your life.

Getting off the Autobahn for a drive along your own back roads is necessary to understand why you are willing to trade high-quality years of your life for instant gratification you loathe 15 minutes later. Because you are.

Rule No. 1, not approved by Dr. Phil or any psychotherapist. From Anne’s perspective: You are in charge of this self-deception. I remember a scathing letter I wrote to my parents at age 36 or so. Quite frankly, they deserved it, but the rage accomplished nothing. 

Playing the victim is a debilitating condition for any of us. My fury brought no response from the Midwest and has never been acknowledged in my relationship with my parents. Always a pacifist, I would only kick the can in our relationship, confined to perhaps 28 days in my adult life, including holidays.

One day I stopped fighting reality, and life has been better ever since. 

Today I love the woman in the mirror but claiming her is a long and interesting story. 

There are times when I wish that I wasn’t such a late bloomer, but reality is that I’m the perfect age to inspire you, to convince you that you absolutely, positively can make changes in your life. I did it after my 50th birthday.

You can find Smart Sensuality Self-Love at any age, and the sooner the better. After all, our goal is keeping you Superyoung.

I’ve won the fight to good health and sizzling, Superyoung sexuality for certain. There is no turning back; no coasting; no possible return to former bad habits. I won this fight by believing and practicing the scientific research that is the subject of this book, a mantra for living with pleasure.

A good strategy is to tell you that I found my inner artist through dance and self-photography. This is true. For several years I wrote down every piece of food that I ate, every drink I consumed. I documented every trip to the gym, how long I stayed there and how many calories were expended.

You will learn about the bad dude who made me so mad that I raced to the gym in refuge. Expletives left my breath with every push up, so profusely that I could thank him today — but I won’t. 

Finding Our Little Person

Typing away just now, I hear a little person in the room, clearing her throat. She has been with me now for over a decade, sort of a guardian angel monitoring my decision-making. I found her to be amazingly astute on a wide range of important life matters, once I began listening to her. 

My little friend was always a square peg in a round hole in Minnesota but she’s smiling now. “We did it!” she says. 

I don’t remember the exact day when either my cousin Jo or my Aunt Naomi sent me a manila envelope filled with photos. Both have provided visual, emotional anchors of my fragmented past. 

When I saw this little person’s photo, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her life was sad and filled with problems when she sat drawing at her grandmother’s table. But her smile and face mesmerized me, reminding her of her dreams. 

Nothing good in life comes without effort, but I will not ask you to lose 50 pounds, as I did yet again. I won’t ask you to exercise seven or more hours a week or beg you to read a book on sensual massage. Note: the technique is highly recommended for connecting with your partner on a sensual plane.

I will ask you to start moving, especially in the bedroom. Don’t be a smarty pants. You can jump rope in there and masturbation is allowed, too.

My Dance In High Gear 

The only difference between us — if you’re just starting this journey of coming to terms with the woman in the mirror — is that I’m just a few dance steps ahead of you on the road to success.

Hopefully, you will pass me on this road to Superyoung Smart Sensuality, and I’ll wave to you. Go ahead and leave me in the dust. Nothing would give me more pleasure.

Ah yes, the ‘pleasure’ word. It’s a positive, life-enhancing, happiness-generating concept, even if you’re surrounded by political and religious forces telling you the p-word is decadent, immoral, distracting, narcissistic and self-defeating.

Stick with me, and pleasure will become a key word in your vocabulary.

We’ll take a look at why pleasure might be better than botox in giving your skin a healthy, new glow. I want to show you the growing, impressive evidence and scientific research validating the health benefits of good sex and exercise anchored in self-love and respect for food.

A growing number of doctors that you will meet on our road to Portofino, recommend this pleasure cocktail to anyone wanting the maximum health and longevity benefits associated with a physically and mentally young lifestyle.

Now comes the key question. Have you been to Italy? The South of France? If we want to understand pleasure, healthy eating, loving ourselves at any age and the priority of sex in our lives, we must get out of America.

My beloved Victoria’s Secret wants us to be Angels, which is a no-win position for American women. Our challenge is to be devilish — not bombshell devilish — just a little bit naughtier than we are today.

We’re going to hell in baby steps, you and I. The road to unleashing our inner vixens is a slow one, and I know just the road we will travel.

The last time I drove along the Mediterranean, I was nearly arrested in Monaco making an illegal u-turn at midnight. Today, I’m off champagne unless a friend is driving. Trust me, an interesting cast of characters awaits you on our journey.

Come along now, clear your schedules, and hop in my roadster. Of course we’ll need more cars, and I do apologize in advance for transportation not being green enough for Anne of Carversvile.

Everyone look for a hybrid, please. That will be a bit less stress on the environment.

Guys, this is a coed trip and much of the science is focused on men. I would caution you to behave yourselves in mixed company, but we ladies can be scoundrels, too. There will be no guilt on this road trip.

Chop, chop. Yes, I write about the importance of slow living, but like all women I speak out of both sides of my mouth. We must get going because I do not want to drive that road in August, when it’s worse than the Los Angeles Freeway.

Collect yourselves now, then start your engines.

Oh yes, please be sure to buckle your seat belts. I like driving fast and especially so when the land of “la dolce vita” in on the road ahead. I’ve been known to kiss the ground when my plane lands in Italy.

Arriving on the scenic route, with you for company, our first view of Portofino’s Promised Land will be indescribably delicious. Anne