I’ve written one book, called , and it’s a collection of very personal essays. It’s implicitly a memoir. In it, I reveal a ludicrous — perhaps unwise — amount about myself. I tell stories in my book that I’ve never uttered to anyone else. People have told me I’m “brave” for being so forthcoming, but I’m not. I’m built to be vulnerable and honest, and I wither if I don’t express myself, so producing my book was grueling but self-serving: I couldn’t not write it, and yes, that’s a double negative.
When it came to writing a fictional sex scene, however, I was stymied. I felt more naked in that endeavor than in composing anything for my book — including a chapter about how my gay brother taught me how to give a killer hand job (not using his own penis: read the book). To me, people who write sex scenes are the gutsy ones. Let me lay out for you the source of my performance anxiety ….
Embarrassment: The Fear
Even though I knew very, very few people would actually read my scene, I was mortified that anyone would. Even though what I wrote is not really about me, I felt like letting anyone see it would be akin to sending her a sex tape of myself. It’s hard not to surmise, when you read one of these scenes, that it reflects the author’s own fantasies, and while I’ve been happy to chronicle, you know, stuff like having an exorcism of sorts to please my ex-husband or or how hard I tried to get Oprah to like me, I’m just not big on detailing my own sexual imagination. Or, more specifically, to run the risk of someone reading fiction I’ve written and rightly or wrongly deducing what flips my skort.
Every writer with whom I spoke advised me not to describe much about the holes and the ins and outs.
Now, of course, that’s my insecurity talking. Because, as a (new) romance reader, I know that when I’m reading a fine love scene, I’m caught up in the moment, and I’m not thinking, “Oh, this is what Eloisa James must enjoy every night with her real-life Italian husband” or, “Obviously Beverly Jenkins loved her late husband so much because they always had mutual orgasms while he was wearing 19th-century cowboy chaps.”
So. If my scene turned out to be any good, then no one reading it would be telling herself, “This is Faith Salie’s hottest fantasy.” Rather, she’d be engaged in the story and not trying to figure out how someone (me) who wears Old Navy sweats when she goes to bed at 9 p.m. has such a fervid, imaginary sex life.
And there’s the rub, as it were: I have no idea if my scene is any good, and that’s not humility speaking. That’s inexperience and self-consciousness.
I toyed with writing something in another period so I could have more of a silkscreen of plausible deniability. I also figured that setting something in the 19th century (my focus in college and grad school) would allow me to create a “sex” scene that might involve something only as racy as … creamy ankles. But then one wonders, are ankles creamy? And then one realizes she is out of her league and that anything one tries to write would be an imitation of Julia Quinn or Eloisa James that would be as pale and pallid as a consumptive Romantic. And they did not have happily ever afters.
