Jean Hanff Korelitz
I am now and I have ever—as in always—been a prude.
I was a prude at age ten, when my older sister told me one of her classmates had a mattress in the back of his van, on which he had sex with his girlfriend.
I was a prude at age thirteen, when I discovered that the girls from my bunk at camp were sneaking into the woods with boys, to make out.
I was a prude all through high school, reacting with stunned disbelief whenever the rumor of another girl losing her virginity swept down the grapevine, completely scandalized when the class heartthrob (who would later, unsurprisingly, become a performer with an international reputation) “forgot” to put his shirt back on after gym class, and waltzed, half-naked, past my locker. (Half naked!) And I was regularly tormented by a classmate who considered my obvious anxiety about sex a source of personal hilarity.
All of this in spite of the fact that my own development wasn’t particularly arrested. I freely attest that I played those sweaty, silly games in basements. I had boyfriends and did the expected things with them. I also had sex at seventeen with a boy I really loved (after holding him off for a year). But in spite of all this, my prudishness was of obvious, epic proportions.
What accounts for this?
I haven’t the faintest, but I’m not about to waste the opportunity at hand on pointless self-analysis. Nature or nurture—who really cares? And I have bigger fish to fry. I’m here for literary confession and personal catharsis. I’m here to tell that jerk who bullied me in the hallways and the boys I didn’t kiss behind the bunk at camp and the guy who forgot to put his shirt back on after gym class and every single person in my life who will be shocked to hear this (in other words, nearly everyone) that there’s something about me they don’t know.
I am the author of a sex novel.
No, no, I don’t mean a novel with sex scenes. I copped to those a long time ago. I’m proud of my four novels, and I’m even proud of the sex scenes they contain, though naturally I can’t bear to reread them (they were painful to write) and tend to blush horribly whenever people tell me how well written they are.
I am the author of a sex novel. A novel about . . . you know . . . sex. A novel in which the sex scenes do not punctuate the narrative but in which the story exists merely to link the sex scenes. A novel you might hide from your kids, as I’ve hidden my allotted author copies (which I still have, of course—who on earth would I have given them to?) from mine. A novel you might, as it were, read with one hand (which I certainly have not!). A novel I decline, here, to name, by an author (me) whose pseudonym I decline to reveal.
What possessed me? That, as Tevye the Dairyman might say, I can tell you in one word: frustration. And not the kind you’re imagining. I’m talking professional frustration, career distress. I’m talking mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-gonna-take-it-anymore dismay of existential proportions.
In 1989, the year I wrote my heretofore secret opus, I was the author of two novels in manuscript that were in the process of being rejected by every publisher on the planet. I had just finished working as an assistant to the editor in chief of an august publishing house, and I had written the novels after work and on the weekends, endlessly tweaking and revising, trying to feel proud of the fact that I was actually, finally creating fiction, something I’d longed to do and been terrified to attempt. When I wasn’t writing I compulsively read the novels of recent college graduates (my contemporaries), accounts of young clubbers wasting their time getting wasted, and did my best not to feel cataclysmically jealous. (I was not successful.)
All the while, rejections were arriving regularly, in off-white envelopes with my agent’s preprinted return address in an elegant font. It wasn’t his fault. I still couldn’t believe I had landed this agent, a great guy with an amazing list of writers, some of whom were even published by the august publishing house I’d recently left. I know it hurt him to pass along those letters of rejection, but not nearly as much as it hurt me. As the months passed, the first and then the second manuscript made a slow but inexorable descent from the most elevated publishers to the second tier, down to the interesting paperback imprints and really respected small presses, until there were no more publishers to reject my work.
That’s how things stood in the summer of 1989 when I found myself at a tradition-soaked artists’ colony in New England, a place where poets and novelists joined visual artists and composers on a campus of splendidly isolated cottages. After breakfast, we would disperse to our cabins for long days of silent creation. Picnic baskets were set gently on each cabin porch at lunchtime, and the cardinal rule was not to approach anyone else’s cabin without invitation, lest the interloper disrupt the creation of “Kubla Khan.”
I was determined to make the most of this opportunity, and resolved to spend my time revising the second of my two novels, the one that had not yet reached the bottom of its long, excruciating slide down the mountain of potential publishers. That first morning I dutifully pulled out my poor rejected manuscript, set it before me on the rustic desk, and tried to brace myself for the assault.
I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.
I was bitter about the editors who had briskly dispatched years of my work in letters written by their assistants. I was bewildered and offended by the druggy, barely fictionalized novels, written as senior projects at Bennington, snapped up by publishers for incomprehensible sums, and currently being read by every person on the subway who was not reading Presumed Innocent or Bonfire of the Vanities. Most of all, I was enraged at myself for spending such a long time writing novels that no one wanted to publish.
I wanted to publish.
I was suddenly determined to use these few, precious weeks to write an entire novel that someone would publish.
I started writing the book—that book—that day.
I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. At night, when the other artists blew off steam over dinner and fast games of Ping-Pong in the main lodge, I pretended I had spent the day hunched over my already spent second novel, but my head was spinning with new and very different characters, in altogether different situations (not to mention a vast array of positions). I did not tell my agent about the new book I was writing, because I had no intention of letting him represent it. This book, if it was ever going to be published, was going to be published under a pseudonym.
Ah, the pseudonym! The thinking, feeling, writing woman’s armor, time tested and battle worn from its past wearers! Jane Austen went out into the world as “A Lady.” Molly Keane, the great girl-chronicler of her horsy, Anglo-Irish set, took her nom de plume, M. J. Farrell, from a pub sign she passed while hacking home from foxhunting, and never emerged as her glorious self until the age of seventy-six, with the publication of her comic masterpiece, Good Behaviour. Mary Ann Evans had to become George Eliot. The Brontë sisters all went undercover to write their tales of girls gone wild. Doris Lessing disguised herself in order to see whether her new work was publishable on its own merits or merely because she was Doris Lessing—a fascinating, somewhat depressing experiment for all involved. The book was the extraordinary Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983).
I had no such nobility of purpose. I was not defying the sexist literary barricade with one of the few tools at my disposal, nor was I cloaking my identity in order to more witheringly satirize my chums. I was not proving a point, à la Lessing, about how publishing stifles new voices in order to spend more money on marquee names. (I should be so lucky as to be a marquee name!) I did it for the worst reason of all. I did it to hide, pure and simple. I did it because the only way I was ever going to be able to write this vividly about sex was to pretend I was someone else, and never ever tell. (What, I have always wondered, is the point of an acknowledged pseudonym? Anne Rice wrote the fairly mind-bending erotica under her pseudonym, Anne Rampling, but if she was going to own up to it, why go to the trouble? Her revealed subterfuge seemed, to me, more embarrassing than the erotica itself.)
It’s logical to assume that my pseudonym, that firewall between myself and the graphic nature of my subject, performed some sort of freeing alchemy for me as I wrote. After all, Repressed Female Locates Inner Sensualist Merely by Donning Mask is a well-worn scenario, but the actual effect wasn’t quite so dramatic. My pseudonym did perform this duty only to the extent that it enabled me to get the words on the page; after that, the effect dissipated into nothingness. In my life beyond that novel, even during the actual two weeks it took me to write it, absolutely nothing changed. I might arrive in the colony dining hall each evening after a full day of lips, tongues, organs, and secretions, restraints and responses, but by the time I sat down at the dinner table I had returned to my natural state of unreconstructed prude. (In fact I was appalled at a real life—and very hot—affair between two of the resident artists, one of them married.) And did the thrust (so to speak) of my subject matter at least have an impact on my sex life with my husband? I wouldn’t dream of telling you. Ick! None of your business!
The truth is that I wouldn’t be able to answer that question even if I wanted to, because I don’t remember much of anything about those two weeks. I’ve driven the whole business from my mind. Writing fiction has always been something of an out-of-the-body experience for me, and it isn’t at all unusual for me to read a sentence in one of my published novels and not have the slightest memory of having composed it. (I’m convinced that this alchemy of creativity is one reason writers are so fixated on the idea of plagiarism, and why so many interesting stories have been written about shady characters turning up, insisting they are the true author of the prize-winning, bestselling magnum opus, and demanding justice and royalties. Deep down, a part of us suspects that someone else has really written those pages and pages of text, and that we are fraudulently taking credit for them.) When it comes to this particular work, I’m even more at a loss. In fact, every time I try to remember what I was thinking as I wrote those things, those acts, those scenes, all I can come up with is: What was I thinking?
Even at the time—and this much I do recall—I had no idea how I was producing this stuff. I hadn’t enough sexual fantasies of my own to fill a chapbook, let alone a novel devoted to sex, and though I’d read what might be called the classics of the genre, they weren’t much help. Fanny Hill seemed too tragic to emulate (enforced prostitution is never a turn-on, no matter how supposedly pleasurable for the prostitute—naturally this book was written by a man), My Secret Life too silly to take seriously (likewise written by a man), and Story of O lost all appeal for me when the whips and branding irons came out (written, famously, by a woman—for a man). Most fortunately, however, I was able to raid the great big public pantry of women’s sexual fantasies, thanks to Nancy Friday and her 1973 classic anthology, My Secret Garden, a book that provided me with an astonishing range of fictional scenarios. (I didn’t have a reference copy in my rustic little cabin in the New England woods, but I had a very good memory.) Friday’s feminist approach to women’s sexuality was also helpful to me, in that it allowed me to distinguish what I was doing from pornography, which I abhorred. It was deeply important to me that the woman at the center of my story be thoroughly in control physically, emotionally, and financially—the boss of herself, nobody’s victim, a person who does exactly what she wants to do for reasons she herself comes to understand only gradually.
To my amazement, the story developed easily, almost effortlessly. Plot had always been hard for me, the weakest link in my two spurned manuscripts, but here, in this book I had neither planned out nor obsessed over, things unfolded naturally. Maybe all the copulating these characters were doing rendered them too relaxed to behave awkwardly. As I made my way into the story, it also became clear to me that, whatever else the novel was becoming, it was also turning into a mystery. This was a surprise of its own. I had certainly not set out to write a mystery. I did not even particularly enjoy reading mysteries. And yet my heroine was becoming murderous before my eyes. Before I knew it, and between set pieces of serious sensuality, she began plotting a perfect crime. Then she carried it out.
And then it was over. To my absolute shock, I had completed a two hundred-odd-page novel in just under two weeks. There it sat, snug in its manuscript box, eyeing me (so to speak). What was I supposed to do with it?
This is what I did with it. I told my husband. He was horrified. I was horrified all over again. But I wanted desperately to publish a book. I wanted to publish a book even more than I wanted to be known for having published a book. I promised to keep writing my “real” novels, I told him, but I was going to try to publish this one.
I picked a pseudonym, and I picked an agent, a woman my own age whom I’d met in publishing circles. (Of course, she had to read the manuscript, knowing I was the author—that was hard—but it was also the last time. From the outset I’d decided that people could either read the novel or know I’d written the novel, but not both.) I handed over my box of pages just as I’d handed over my previous novels, then I assumed the usual defensive crouch as I waited to hear from publishers. Always, in the past, ecstatic letters had gone out to my agent, assuring us both that I was gifted and that my work was promising, and then rejecting us both. (I had written these letters myself, in my editorial assistant job, so I recognized them for what they were: simply the approved publishing language and format for “We didn’t love it. Good-bye.”) But this time there was a different script. A small but respected publisher of erotica liked the book. He bought the book. Then he published the book. In due course, publishers in other countries liked and bought and published the book. And once, a Hollywood producer, who likewise liked the book, decided to make a film out of it. (In retrospect, I’m actually glad this film never materialized.) When my author copies arrived, I promptly hid them, and I never reread or even looked at the novel again. In fact I more or less forgot that it even existed, except when the royalty checks arrived. (Even all these years later, it remains the only one of my books to earn out its advance and pay royalties.)
Years went by, and I wrote other books, which were published under my own name. For these novels my rule became that sex scenes would only occur if they could not possibly be avoided, and perhaps this inescapable quality helped get me over the hump when it came time to write them. Even so, and even given the fact that these scenes were downright tame when compared to my sex novel, I found them harrowing. That was my name on the manuscript, for one thing. And those were my characters, not always lovable but lovingly created. They were whole people whom I’d made, and they were taking their clothes off in public! To get myself through these scenes, I made rules about what could not be said. I would not use clinical language—penis, vagina, clitoris, for example, which smelled of the dissection lab. I would not use the kinds of euphemisms that appeared in romance novels and were too silly to take seriously. I would also not use colloquialisms like cock or dick, which, for me, killed the mood. So what was left? Merely: what the characters, in flagrante delicto, are thinking.
For this approach, which was not, after all, planned, but only a result of eliminating things I was unwilling to say, I realized belatedly that I had an unlikely source to acknowledge. Many years before, I had been vacationing at a seaside resort in Mombasa, Kenya, with my parents and sister, in a hotel filled with people I might now refer to as “Eurotrash,” but who at the time seemed to me impossibly so-phisticated teenagers. My parents, somewhat uncharacteristically, had allowed my sister and me to attend the evening’s social event, a big noisy disco, at which I uncomfortably danced with an older guy from France or Spain or some other exotic place (history does not record this detail). I, naturally, was extremely uncomfortable to be dancing with a stranger in a mostly unbuttoned shirt (Prude!) and more than a little concerned that he would discover I was twelve years old, so I took off when the music ended and went to hide in the bathroom.
Down the hall, in a darkened room, a movie was playing, and I stopped in the open doorway to look. The scene under way was absolutely wanton: an orgy, in fact. I stood dumbfounded in the doorway, watching, and when the setting changed, I went inside and sat down.
The film was The Seven Minutes, an adaptation of the novel by Irving Wallace, which I would read a few years later as a teenager. It tells the story of an obscenity trial in California, in which a courageous bookseller faces charges for selling a supposedly licentious novel, also entitled The Seven Minutes. The seven minutes in question occur as the Lady Chatterley-esque heroine is in bed with her lover, and the focus of the novel-within-a-novel are the thoughts running through her mind as she is making love. Very little physical description of the act accompanies this stream of consciousness, but the character’s very thoughts are enough to drive Wallace’s small-minded bureaucrats and PTA types into a collective frenzy. A woman’s mind, in other words, is the ultimate sex organ. Fifteen years on, with my unacknowledged erotic novel behind me and the even more daunting task of writing sex scenes for real and complex literary characters before me, I decided that this was the only approach I could possibly take.
This decision, and not my decision to write a novel about sex and publish it under another woman’s name, was the catalyst that enabled me to confront this material, and in the years since I have been alternately amused and amazed to find myself called a writer of persuasive erotic scenes. I accept this appraisal. I know I write these scenes well, and not only because I’ve been told so more times than I can count. I also know because I read the sex scenes in other people’s novels, and I find them generally horrendous. (Ironically enough, a long sex scene in Wallace’s The Seven Minutes, between the hero-attorney and his fiancée, is one of the worst I’ve ever encountered.) And I know because, well . . . I just know. It may embarrass the hell out of me, but the evidence is clear: when it comes to literary beds, I’m frankly good in them.
Eventually, when the agent with the wonderful list of authors finally dumped me as a client—two novels rejected by everyone on the planet proved too much for him, in the end—I was forced to tell my next agent about my erotic novel I’d published, but thank goodness she never asked to see a copy. Over the years, I confided in one or two friends, always laughing about it, swearing them to secrecy, never once revealing the pseudonym or the title. Once, a British tabloid contacted my husband about a rumor that his wife had written a pornographic novel, and my husband, who was extremely upset, was forced to fend them off. I don’t know where the rumor came from, or where it went. And once, in the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, I was loitering in the Newsagent, trying to find something to buy that exactly fit the handful of English change I had left over, when I happened to look up at the top rack of the bookshelves. This was where they kept erotic novels, paperbacks with scantily clad women and men on their covers. The books had titles like Hard to Please and Everything She Wanted. One of them was mine. I stared at it. I had never seen this edition. Its cover showed a woman in something that looked like a leather bikini and thigh-high leather boots. She was holding a whip. She appeared extremely annoyed. I bought a copy of my favorite British magazine (BBC Homes & Antiques) and returned to my seat, irrationally imagining that the link between myself and the woman with the whip was obvious to all.
So, am I ashamed of what I did? Not exactly. I wrote a novel in two weeks that was pretty well put together, that still pays me royalty checks (albeit very little ones) twenty years later, and—far more important—that gave me the blast of courage that I needed to set aside my two scorned novels (which, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, were never to see the light of print) and write a plot-driven book that would be the first of my four published novels (so far!).
So, am I proud of what I did? Not exactly. I still cringe when I remember some of the things in that novel and think about how horrified I would be if someone who knew I had written it actually read it. Because, although I am the twenty-years-married author of an erotic novel (not to mention racy scenes in my acknowledged novels), I am still, as I always shall be, the most straightlaced person I know.
A few years ago I had a sadly telling conversation with my friend Elisa. We were talking about Sex and the City, and I was taking issue with the morning-after debriefings those characters enjoyed, the free and open discussion of sexual foibles, triumphs, and predicaments. I didn’t believe that for a second. “It’s ridiculous, the way they talk about sex,” I told her. “I mean, I wouldn’t dream of talking to my friends about my sex life. It’s so personal. Men do that, I guess, but women just don’t discuss sex.”
“Jean,” Elisa said, sighing, “I talk about sex with all my friends. Except for you, of course. You know, you’re such a prude.”