Anna Godbersen | Writing Desire

In sixth grade I began what was then my most ambitious reading project to date, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, an 876 page doorstopper (not an easy task for any eleven year old, much less a late-blooming and slow reader like me); and though I was surely enthralled by the strong female characters, the mysticism, and the magnificently imagined historical setting, I have no illusions regarding the real reason I spent my after school hours with the women of the Arthurian legends instead of the kids on Saved By The Bell. This book was going to have a lot of sex scenes -- extramarital sex, coerced sex, pagan ritual sex -- a girl could just smell it.

Like any writer, I hope people will read my novel, not to mention this post, from first word to last, but if you happen to be pressed for time, or a young person ambivalent about literature yet eager for life, I'll get to the point: the 'good parts' of my most recent book can be found on pages 70, 109, 250-254, 270, and 305. I make no special claims for myself as a writer of erotica, but one of the remarkable things about literary sex is that it doesn't have to be groundbreaking, or even all that verbally dexterous, to fascinate and titillate. There is much to be gleaned even from questionable descriptions of the deed (and the history of letters is lousy with those), especially about the writer themselves -- the nature as well as the limits of that writer's sexual experience and imagination, for instance, or their subconscious assumptions, what draws their shame.

Writing a good sex scene isn't easy, not least because any sex scene is also an action scene, and action is where prose can become wooden (ahem), or way too literal. We writers are stumped by writing sex for the same reason we are stumped getting our character across the room -- the play-by-play is kind of boring. The flip side is that the more figurative bedroom prose often breeds cliché, and otherwise nimble writers are guilty of concocting silly or tumescent (forgive me) metaphors in order to depict their characters' intimate experiences. The surest way to not embarrass yourself is to write such scenes as best you can and then cross at least half the words out, and I understand the impulse of many to excise entirely such a powerful yet flustering aspect of life from their fictional creations. But pages 70, 109, 250-254, 270, and 305 were necessary, because they are part of a book about a sexpot's seduction of a politician (for complicated reasons, somewhat to do with Soviet espionage); to skip them would have meant not only missing out on a lot of the fun, but also missing the point. Oh, and that sexpot and that politician? They are Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy.

Was I intimidated by the task of depicting what it would have been like if two of the most charismatic and famously attractive figures of all time got busy? Yes, yes I was. Even typing their names evokes the style and cool of their era, which complicates imagining them primal or hot. Plus it is impossible to speak of either without invoking their very tragic, and very public deaths, and that kind of sorrowful reverence cripples the profane mind. Both were allegedly promiscuous, so there was a lot of research material to work with, but I found most of the old timey kiss-and-tell rumors questionable and uninspiring. If the stories are to be believed, neither was a particularly amazing lover (she too eager to please, he often hurried by his hunger for conquest), and I felt that if I was going to go to the trouble of undressing my characters, then I wanted the result to be at least a little sexy. But in writing, as in life, the moment of greatest challenge and frustration can also be the beginning of revelation.

I didn't know, when I began writing this novel, why my characters Marilyn and Jack would have appealed to each other (I mean, besides the obvious, which is that they were, to borrow the words of Derek Zoolander, really, really ridiculously good looking), or what they would have wanted from the other once they were naked. But in asking these questions, I came to a finer understanding not just of their sexual identities, but of the their larger selves, that unwieldy and inexpressible human mess each of us carries through life. I didn't want to tell my readers what this man and woman were like at dinner parties or press conferences, how beautifully they moved, how wittily they told jokes; I wanted to find out what they might have been like in the dark, in the back seat of a car, in the bathroom at a party thrown by movie producer, what was at work in their most desirous and violent and vulnerable moments. Isn't that the whole point of reading fiction anyway: to unearth the secret, tender life which official history cannot help but misinterpret and obscure. Not the who and where, but the how and why.