‘Does she know me?’ — ‘She thinks I’ve stopped seeing you.’ — ‘Why is it she doesn’t know about me but I have to know about her?’ We see how the different women in this book react to the simultaneous relationships with Barney Kincaid, M.D. Another book in the set, Dyan Sheldon’s Victim of Love, also deals with such male compartmentalisation, and there, the pain, unease, and drama may be more convincing by the standards of the psychological novel. Here, in Doctor Love, the author is comparatively more sympathetic to the hero’s whims and fever dreams. It’s a stream of wish fulfilment complete with descriptions of sex, which are however not sustained with the hard stare of the explicitly pornographic novels in the set. It indulges in the fantasy of living multiple optional lives where one can always slot into the one which best meets one’s current needs (for crazy adventure, for familiarity and comfort, for intellectual stimulation, or simply, for lust). The all-important first page immediately introduces us to the ’insatiable’ variant of woman. ‘The smallest movement awoke her every time (…) ”What have we here?” cooed Debra, coming alert with instant possessiveness.’ Barney is mostly portrayed not as the agent of desire, but as someone who with a sigh responds to the various demands of the women he finds himself surrounded by, in the way a small child will sigh when it is sent to clean up his or her room. He is subjected to them as to his own reactions: ‘Barney heard her crying, heard his moan, felt himself close to coming but decided to hold back.’ The broadly dismissive Kirkus review holds that ‘The only slightly distinctive thing about this crass yet maudlin N.Y./Jewish sex-comedy is that it's written by a woman but focuses on a man.’ But why end with this reference?