Shere Hite was a legend of her time who landed in my small ex-council flat when I was in my 20s. She was two decades older and seemed to me to be an extraordinary, exotic creature transmuted from celluloid into strange reality in my home. To those over 50, Hite – a pivotal figure in the second wave feminist movement – was a much-photographed writer and sexologist: a mix between Germaine Greer and a movie star. To those younger, the name draws a blank. Hence the title of Nicole Newnham’s superb new documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite.
I had known about this feminist author from my mother’s bookshelf when I was a child, read about her in Cosmopolitan as a teenager and was quite fascinated by the idea of her by the time I was 25 and went to interview her.
