Thomas, Sean 1963-

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Thomas, Sean 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born 1963, in Devon, England. Education: Attended University College London.

CAREER:

Writer, journalist.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, Hamlet Cigars, 2000, for Kissing England.

WRITINGS:

Absent Fathers (novel), Deutsch (London, England), 1996.

Kissing England (novel), Flamingo (London, England), 2000.

The Cheek Perforation Dance (novel), Flamingo (London, England), 2002.

Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You: A Story of Life, Love, and Internet Dating (memoir), Bloomsbury (London, England), 2006, Da Capo Press (Cambridge, MA), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and the Guardian.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sean Thomas is a British journalist and novelist and is the author of the 2006 memoir, Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You: A Story of Life, Love, and Internet Dating. His novels, like his memoir, explore various aspects of sexual life and of men coming of age in modern England.

Thomas's 1996 debut novel, Absent Fathers, examines the changes a successful young dealer in foreign currency must make when he learns that his girlfriend is pregnant and that his toddler niece is suffering from permanent brain damage. Kissing England, Thomas's second novel, looks at three young men who were at school together and are now in their thirties and each, separately, is going through a life crisis of one sort or another. Alex is an over-sexed consultant; Eddie, from the landed gentry, is a heroin addict; while Tony, married to Eddie's sister Elizabeth, outwardly seems the most "normal" of the trio. He loves his wife, has two children, and works a nine-to-five job. But Tony, too, is undergoing a crisis because he fears that his wife is being unfaithful to him.

With his third novel, The Cheek Perforation Dance, Thomas takes his personal experience as the falsely accused perpetrator of a rape as grist for a courtroom novel about a rape trial. Patrick is the club-owning former boyfriend of Rebecca, a Jewish princess who generally likes her sex with a rough edge to it. After breaking up, the couple gets back together for one final session of love-making, except that this time Rebecca claims it was nonconsensual. Patrick is summarily hauled up before the Old Bailey on charges that could send him to prison for life. Through the course of the trial, Patrick and Rebecca's former relationship is detailed. Reviewing this novel in the Guardian Online, Phil Daoust praised Thomas's "tough but tender prose [that] describes the folie à deux quite beautifully, from the initial courtship to the fatal falling-out." Daoust further felt the novel was a "gripping whodun-what," but at the same time wished that the author "hadn't made Patrick and Rebecca such crushing bores."

Thomas was prodded into writing Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You by an editor hoping to get an article and also to cheer up the rather depressed writer. Thus began a process of Internet dating in all its highs and lows, as Tim O'Neil described it in an article on the PopMatters Web site: "The pointless dates without any chemistry, the good dates that eventually fizzle into nothing, the folks who simply disappear for no apparent reason, the folks who seem for a moment to be simply too good to be true (and invariably are)." O'Neil cautioned readers against thinking that Thomas's book was a "social study on the subject of Internet dating." Instead, O'Neil pointed out, Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You is "most importantly a memoir, detailing not only Thomas' current adventures in Internet dating but illustrating his entire dating history." Through the process of such dates, Thomas is confronted with his own baser motives and his rather shallow approach to women and relationships. "The portrait is not entirely flattering," O'Neil wrote, but the "saving grace … is in Thomas' keen awareness of his own boorishness." A higher assessment came from an Internet Bookwatch contributor who termed the book "a fine ‘must’ for any single readers, and for any who have wondered about the rigors of Internet dating." For a Publishers Weekly reviewer, however, "the overall result is too much Thomas and not enough Internet." And from a Kirkus Reviews critic came a mixed judgment: "Not nearly as explicit as one would expect from a horny single guy on the make—instead, a tastefully amusing roll in the hay."