Stalking Sly Stallone and Other Unfortunate Choices: A Memoir by a Love and Sex Addict

After her debut in the South in the early 1970s, Stirling Chapel lands a clandestine affair with the president of a celibate ashram, avoids sex at the “Center for the Lower Self,” pursues her crush on Sylvester Stallone, gets a job working with him, and levitates in the cornfields of Iowa, all while religiously applying every spiritual principal she learns to her own situation. She consistently uses various forms of eccentric self-help and magical thinking in pursuit of men, frequently with disastrous results. In her mid-thirties she finally joins a group of love and sex addicts, defiantly refuses to follow suggestions, gets professional help, and starts to build the foundation she does not know is missing. She believes now that life allowed her to fall on her teeth again and again until she understood certain things and became more whole, piece by piece. “I’m offering what I learned painstakingly over time,” she says, “with the hope that your journey will be shorter and less painful than mine. Believe me, at the time, none of it was funny.” Stirling gained an inner “post and pier foundation,” met her husband, and married twelve years ago. Life has led her home to herself, and that was, she knows now, a great deal more important than finding a partner. She hopes to use her thirty years of struggle and over forty years of inner work to save others suffering, time, and money. And as her therapist has said, “Nothing is funnier than hearing Stirling talk about her deepest pain.” www.StirlingChapel.com