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In fact, in terms of exploring the potential for sex in fiction, I felt that I hadn’t gone nearly far enough. That two or three short scenes of sex between men was the occasion of so much comment said more about mainstream publishing in 2016, I think, than it did about my book. The biggest surprise of publishing my first novel, What Belongs to You was how much people wanted to talk about the sex in a book that, by any reasonable standard, has very little sex in it. Sex in an American suburb is not quite the same phenomenon as sex in, say, an eastern European apartment blockĪnd yet, of course, we are asked why we write about sex. All of which is to say that sex is a kind of crucible of humanness, and so the question isn’t so much why one would write about sex, as why one would write about anything else. Sex in an American suburb is not quite the same phenomenon as sex in, say, an eastern European apartment block, and sex scenes can do a great deal to illuminate the social and historical forces that make the difference. Finally, sex puts us in contact with our shared animal nature and is also inflected by a particular place and time. Nothing exposes us more, not just physically, though that’s not insignificant, but also morally nowhere am I more aware of selfishness and generosity, cruelty and tenderness, daring and failure of nerve, in my partners and in myself, than in sex. In no other activity, I think, do the physical and metaphysical draw so near one another-nowhere else do we feel so intensely both our bodies and something that seems to exceed our bodies-and so our writing of sex can be at once acutely descriptive of bodies in space and expansively philosophical. Sex throws us profoundly into ourselves, our own sensations, physical and emotional it is also, at least when it’s interesting, the moment when we’re most carefully attuned to the experience of another.
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Sex is an experience of intense vulnerability, and it is also where we are at our most performative, and so it’s at once as near to and as far from authenticity as we come.
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This usefulness lies in a series of interlocked contradictions.
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Sex is a uniquely useful tool for a writer, a powerful means not just of revealing character or exploring relationships, but of asking the largest questions about human beings. More than this, surely it is absurd to claim that a central activity of human life, a territory of feeling and drama, is off-limits to art. This is a gift not all languages have received a translator once complained to me that in her language there was only the diction of the doctor’s office or of pornography, neither of which felt native to poetry. One of the glories of being a writer in English is that two of our earliest geniuses, Chaucer and Shakespeare, wrote of the sexual body so exuberantly, claiming it for literature and bringing its vocabulary – including all those wonderful four-letter words – into the texture of our literary language. I once heard a wonderful writer, addressing students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, say that her ideal of a sex scene would be the sentence: “They sat down on the sofa …” followed by white space. T here is a widely held belief, among English-language writers, that sex is impossible to write about well – or at least much harder to write about well than anything else.