With each chapter, Martin builds a case for the primacy of female infidelity and for a societal reckoning with that truth. Step by step, she shows that she’s thought deeply about her subject, and that all of these seemingly disparate intellectual threads are related and worthy of having been braided together. Despite all-too-common portrayals as “the passive, comparatively disinterested sex,” she writes, women carry with them “a tale of passionate, voluptuous pleasures and sometimes of tremendous risk-taking in the pursuit of sexual satisfaction.”

The sui generis quality of Untrue is the author’s forte. Martin’s blockbuster best seller, Primates of Park Avenue, upset both denizens of the Upper East Side, for what they felt was unfair skewering, as well as some book critics and readers, for blurring the lines between memoir, anthropological study, and fiction. Yet one gets the feeling, reading Primates today, that Martin’s chief aim with the book was to incite, to ignite, and to make readers think outside narrow boxes of categorization.

Untrue feels similar in its aims, but with more academic focus and less memoir. The latter is unfortunate, particularly in a book that so forthrightly limns the sex lives of her subjects. And yet, Martin’s omission of her own sexual history is deliberate. “My own path,” she writes, “is not relevant to other women’s situations, and I haven’t shared it on the chance that my choices might somehow be misconstrued as a recommendation or imply some ‘best choice.’” The omission is also understandable within the context of Untrue, which frequently describes the double standards with which society views a woman who is honest about her own lusts and desires. Having been publicly shamed and labeled a slut myself when I published my first memoir, I get it. If anything, what Martin doesn’t tell us about herself might ironically prove the need for her book to help combat norms that have kept women from telling the truth about who they are, not just as wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, but also as sexual beings with avid libidos.

And lest you think it’s only men, society, and Madison Avenue policing women’s sexuality, Martin reminds readers that women can sometimes be their own worst enemies. As she writes, “In addition to all the threats and roadblocks women … are up against when they decide monogamy is not for them and choose to be open about it, or when they decide to be non-monogamous without disclosing it … they mirror and intensify society’s contempt for the woman who is untrue, doubling it back onto themselves. Subjected to slut-shaming, many women join in and pile on themselves.”

Read more: Why is it so hard for women to write about sex?

The acknowledgment of such self-policing, along with the uncovering of untruths women have been force-fed their entire lives about their own tendencies toward being sexually untrue—that women are prone to fidelity, that the woman who steps out is both tramp and anomaly—lends these pages, under the banner of a deliberate double-entendre title, a seething undercurrent of revolutionary fervor akin to what many may have felt marching in the streets wearing pussy hats the day after Trump’s inauguration. No wonder one hears the echo of Yeats in the book’s final lines: “Women are just as likely to step out as men are. Our dearest held binary cannot hold.”