Tattoo this name on your brain: Aimee Crocker. Or, as she liked to be called, "Princess Galitzine" (the title was a remnant of a marriage to a Hungarian royal). Seriously, this woman lived a life that makes Angelina Jolie's look like a convent girl's. Born into luxury in 1900's San Francisco, she defied her parents, abandoned all conventions, bought a steamer ship and set east for a lifetime of adventure. And what an adventure it was. Having always felt the pull of the Orient, she knew once she set sail that the Far East was the only place for her. She tells of living in the harem of an Indian Rajah, of being the sex slave and house prisoner of an Shanghai aristocrat, and of being abducted by a Javanese prince and barely escaping the jungle alive.
And it's not just she who is ready to toss her knickers at a moment's notice. Apparently, unchecked hormones were the order of the day. In India, she meets a prim young girl who ditches her stiff English chaperone for a local Bombay shop owner and spends the rest of her life in blissful (and satisfied) purdah. Another acquaintance, a spinster and governess to two bratty American children, abandons her charges for a Japanese rickshaw runner. As Aimee insightfully puts it, "The fact is that her imagination and her normal desires had been struggling against her Puritanical training, and finally, under the influence and freedom and trance of the East, she had succumbed."
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Aimee has an affair with a python (yes, that's what I said) and experiences "a strange, tickling sensation that was...very enjoyable."
She meets up with two American expatriate women in Shanghai who promise her an experience she'll never be able to describe, and drive her to a mysterious house where she experiences wild, unspeakable stirrings from the sounds of a violin.
She has a glittering candlelit dinner with two lipstick lesbians in a remote country house in India on the last night of their lives. The next morning, they are found murdered in their bed.
She finds herself without funds in Europe at the outbreak of WWI, travels steerage on a ship from Naples to New York and is proposed to by an Italian fruit vendor. (She declines, gracefully.)
And there's so, so much more. Through it all, she remains eager, unflappable and unrepentant. Hence the title, "And I'd Do It Again."
Why hasn't her life been turned into a movie yet?