Sex with Jonathan Franzen
It's a Valentine's Day special dedicated to sex writing
In honor of Valentines Day, let’s…talk about sex. Or rather let’s talk about writing sex scenes which is an art that doesn’t get taught or discussed enough.
My first novel has quite a few sex scenes in it. When I was writing them as a baby in my twenties, I didn’t give much thought to it because that novel is about infidelity, and there were quite a few times when my main character (the cheater) was going to have sex. So I just wrote those sex scenes, just like I wrote him eating when he needed to, and painting, which was how he earned a living.
It’s only in hindsight that I realize that including sex scenes in literary fiction is a polemic act. It wasn’t all that long ago that sex and sex-adjacent scenes in high brow literature sent publishers’ pulses into overdrive because they thought their readers would confuse their literary fiction titles with the black sheep genre, romance. Thankfully, we live in a slightly more open-minded world in in terms of what can and can’t happen, sexually, in literary writing. Alyssa Songsiridej’s debut novel “Little Rabbit” was positively confetti-ed with prize nominations this year, and it’s a highly erotic book, and writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, Melissa Broder, and Terry McMillan have been infusing haute-couture literature with hot sex scenes for many spicy years, now. 1
In today’s newsletter, we’re going to explore the joys of sex writing. I’m less interested in the delineation between “good” sex writing and “bad” sex writing (which is subjective), and far more interested in what sex scenes can do for a given narrative.
To kick things off, we are going to experience a sex scene written by Jonathan Franzen. As with much of the content in today’s post, the content is R-Rated. There will be raunchy and explicit language, there will be material about domination and submission. If these things make you uncomfortable, this is not the post for you.
If you’re still with us: it’s time to brave the briny waters of sex à la Jonathan Franzen. Ready? Here we go.