Question 4:
Most of you have commented on some of the public resistance you've encountered in writing about sex. Have you also received flack in your private lives, and have all the sacrifices been worth it?
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 Writers receive flack for writing about their childhoods, much less matières sexuelles. As someone who moves in a fairly conventional world (upper-middle class Manhattan), even if that world is supposed to be radically less conventional than whatever part of America is caricatured as being supremely conventional, I've found the response to my writing about sex to be often infantile when it's not snide, and when it's neither of those, it's often subtly and not-so-subtly disapproving. Again, this response has been truer of men than women, although there are plenty of women who react badly (especially if they happen to have daughters in my daughter's class). I don't think "mainstream" America is comfortable with people writing about anything remotely aberrant -- from erotic spanking to lesbian thoughts -- and basically regards such efforts as literary farting, to put it bluntly. This is especially true, as I think I said earlier, if you've made a reputation for writing "literarily," and then suddenly come out and discuss your erotic life, and then go back to writing "literarily." In all candor, my piece about spanking (which I recently referred to over drinks with two men as "slightly infamous" -- not sure if I was being modest or delusional) that appeared in The New Yorker probably did more for my "visibility" than any piece I've ever written, including a novel. Sad, I suppose -- or not sad, however you want to look at it. It had something to do, of course, with the combination of the magazine and the piece. The best response I got to that piece came from an elderly writer and former editor at The New Yorker who sent me a note which began: "You confirm my theory that if you go far enough into the personal you come out safely on the other side . . ." I scotch-taped that note above my desk to remind myself that it was possible to be understood on the profoundest of levels just when I was feeling that I was being gawked at like a sideshow. As for the "sacrifices," are they ever worth it? I sometimes feel that now that my pieces have been collected in a book, Dreaming of Hitler, some of them -- the ones about spanking, lesbianism and breast reduction, specifically -- follow me around, creating a false aura of outspokenness that's titillating to some men and scary to others. As a result, the last man I went out with wanted me to sign a sort of psychological pre-nuptial, in which I would agree never to write about him or his family. This was after three dates and his professing great interest in me. The whole thing made me feel weary and weird, as if I were doomed never to walk among the unexposed masses ever again. I'm sounding slightly melodramatic, but only slightly. I also recently had the experience of an editor saying to me -- apropos of an essay I was having trouble revising because I wanted to address the cultural implications of my subject instead of upping the ante on the personal end -- "Exposure's your thing, isn't it." To which I answered, "I hope not my only thing." But maybe once you write about even quasi-taboo matters they stick to you and you can never shake them off no matter what else you write about . . . |
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