From serious high-brow literature to warm and cozy rom-coms, what do we want or need from writers when it comes to including sex in their books?
To consider the matter, Kate is joined by writer and critic Elizabeth Morris and author Alex Alison. Elizabeth is creator of Crib Notes, a monthly newsletter full of reading recommendations aimed at busy mothers. Formerly, Elizabeth ran events at Waterstones Gower Street bookshop, one of which was dedicated to Good Sex Writing. She also wrote her MA thesis on sex in Shakespeare.
Alex Allison’s debut novel The Art of the Body won the Somerset Maugham award, and his second Greatest of All Timeis newly released. The story explores a relationship between two young premier league footballers that is both rivalrous and physically intimate. A chance lunch with Elizbeth found him strong-armed into joining us to represent both writers and the male point-of-view. For if men aren’t reading ACOTAR on the tube, where are they getting their fictional spice kicks?
From highlights to lowlights, this show is packed with recommendations for books we think push all the right buttons, once we’ve figured out what those are.
Listen via the media player or your preferred podcast app with this podfollow link.
Booklist
Greatest of All Time by Alex Allison
Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon
Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingals
The Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards
The Office of Gardens and Ponds by Didier Decoin
Pax by John Harvey
The River Capture by Mary Costello
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith
The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
All Fours by Miranda July
The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Elmet and Hot Stew by Fiona Mosley
Tampa by Alyssa Nutting
Isaac by Curtis Garner
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Lullaby by Leïla Slimani
The Country of Others and Watch Us Dance by Leïla Slimani
The Bear by Marianne Engel
The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy
Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest
Transcript
Kate: Elizabeth, Alex, it’s great to have you both here. Elizabeth, we’re supposed to be talking about sex writing, and yet we seem to be opening with football. Why did you think Alex’s book was a good fit?
Elizabeth: I love football and there is not a lot of literary fiction about football.
And there are also a couple of themes in it, masculinity and sexuality that I always love reading about it. And Alex does all of that incredibly well. But I think what made me feel obsessed with this book, and I think something that gives it a universal resonance is how well Alex writes about intimacy and desire and sex.
Reading this book was very similar to my experiences reading Call Me By Your Name, or Normal People by Sally Rooney, where there was this incredibly propulsive, erotic charge that ran through the book, these crescendos of desire that made it so incredibly page turning. So that really impressed me and I just fascinated about how Alex had written this book.
Kate: There is this incredible charge between these two young male protagonists and this relationship between them that starts with a rivalry, a professional rivalry, and quickly becomes something more than that. And yes, it does have these scenes of physical intimacy and the physicality is almost, it’s clearly written about as the games, the matches which are also incredibly vivid and incredibly compelling.
And they’re also quite physical.
Elizabeth: Also, the one informs the other, doesn’t it? Because you’ve got these heightened emotions on the pitch and then the proximity of these two players, and that’s what makes it so intense, I think.
Kate: Yeah. So let’s let you tell us, Alex. You’ve heard what we thought. Tell us what you were intending and why it was important to you to have this really strong physical thread running through it.
Alex: I would say that it’s my main preoccupation as a writer. This notion of embodiment and corporeality. It’s about bodies navigating their way through space, knowing how they respond to each other. And in this book, the narrative focus is somebody who has to really sequester their desire. And the way that’s lived out in the way the two performs on the pitch has a real consistency there.
Kate: In the acknowledgements you talk about your own football club, which is Wimbledon AFC, which you are a part-owner of. Is that … I know so little about football, this is one of those clubs that’s part owned by the fans, is that right?
Alex: That’s right. Yeah. It’s less impressive than it sounds. You can be an owner of Wimbledon AFC, I think for about £35 a year, which gives you full voting rights on the club equal to somebody who’s put in millions of pounds. But yeah, we’ve got a really unique history. The club brands itself is having the greatest backstory in football. We had the biggest injustice in British football history committed to us when the club was relocated to Milton Keynes, in the only instance of franchising in British football, the club decided that they were going to start like a phoenix from the ground up in the ninth tier of English football. It only took us nine years to be promoted back into the professional ranks where we now sit still in League 2.
Kate: I loved reading this. It felt to me incredibly rooted and grounded in how football works, how people behave within the sport of football, and of course, this relationship between these two protagonists. This is a homosexual relationship and they’re not able to be open about that. That’s one of the very strong threads running through the book.
And in your acknowledgements, you referenced the fact that for many sportspeople, that is the case and your hope that’s going to change. That was really a really beautiful thing about this book, that it was holding that up.
Alex: Yeah, it’s explicitly the message that I’m trying to communicate, that the narratives around being gay in sport don’t have to be centered around shame.
You can’t compete with the entertainment of football, right? What you can do is have a very human-centered story at the heart of it, where it’s this under-acknowledged, under explored area of people’s life that’s hyper-documented journalistically without ever really having a large degree of sympathy for the players.
And there are parts of the book that explicitly allude to that how unsympathetic we are as fans. When a player’s injured or out for a long time, how we really underestimate the naivety and youth of a player who’s 19 years old, relocating to a different country, to a language that he doesn’t speak.
It’s this really unique work environment where you’ve got a mix of nationalities, ages, religions, and everybody is expected to rise to the same level and come together to form a cohesive unit. And it’s a minor miracle that ever really happens. I think that type of environment is ripe for romance.
Kate: I thought it was really great. But, you must have had to think quite carefully about how you were going to handle the physical intimacy that happens between these two men, which takes us to our larger question about sex writing in books. How do we feel about it? As I said in my intro, there’s a lot of it about, and I think it’s interesting, the current vogue for Romantasy and these books where sex is very foregrounded and the way that this is something now that people can be very open about.
It’s almost like a barrier has been broken where it’s no longer embarrassing to be seen to be reading something steamy on the tube. What’s changed? Is it about the writing? Is writing about sex suddenly a lot better? In the uk apparently sales of romance fiction rose 110% between 2023 and 2024 and are now worth 53 million pounds annually.
Romance is a big thing now and ’cause it’s making money, everyone is paying attention to it.
Elizabeth: I think that romance was formally in quite a derogatory way called ‘chick lit’, and it was the kind of book that you would find at the supermarket. I think now it’s had a bit of a rebrand, and I think a lot of that is down to platforms like TikTok, the way that those books go viral.
But also, I think so much of this is to do with the pandemic and the way that people were starved of touch and starved of contact with other people. And also because it was so awful all the time that people wanted to read romance. People wanted to read things with happy endings. I think people have always enjoyed romance, but I do think that the touch thing is key when we look at the way that sex is so central to romance now.
Alex: I think that commissioning editors have more tools at their disposal for understanding what reader’s appetites are and the parts of books that they’re most drawn to. Because of Kindle and other e-reader related data, they can hone in on what there’s an appetite for and pander to it as much as possible.
Within literary fiction, I think that the biggest and most notable trend that correlates is the rise of auto-fiction over the last decade, where it’s aligned with people’s appetite for authenticity and writing and experiencing real stories that have sex as a major centre to them.
Kate: Mmn, there’s also the opposite of that, which is wildly improbable fantasy. At this point, let me tell you a little bit more about Ice Planet Barbarians, which I mentioned in my introduction, which I had never heard of 22 books, each of them about 200 pages long, about some women who get kidnapped by aliens and end up on this planet where they encounter seven foot blue humanoids who are just large in every sense of the word apparently, who, although mainly interested in mating as the way term in the books apparently do it in a very loving, consensual, obliging way where it’s all very much wish fulfillment and women lap these up apparently. At one point one of the books was the fifth most sold book on Amazon – they’ve sold hundreds and thousands of copies.
Elizabeth: I spoke to two editors who work at Headline at the Eternal imprint. They publish all of the romantic stuff.
They talked about the way that the sales have grown, but actually the appetite for romance has always been there. And what is actually the case now is just that publishers are publishing them in a mainstream way. Before a lot of it was fan fiction that was online. Or it was self-published stuff. So I asked the question, what do these books tell us about sexual appetites amongst readers?
Because a lot of them are about mermaids and, as you say, these aliens whose genitals are apparently based on the rabbit vibrators and dildos. But why is that funny? Sariah emailed me and she said, ‘I find it interesting that people are always so perplexed by these monster romances because actually they’ve always been with us.’
For example, she talked about Hellboy and she talked about Dracula. Even though I would say personally, I find that quite predatory. I think the thing about these monster romances and these romances with men who are maybe mermen or half man half something else, is it’s a way of safely exploring sexual desires.
And one of the key features seems to be things like biting. So these different elements or male creatures who have forked tongues, which are especially useful for female pleasure and tentacles that can be used in several orifices… And I think that also that one of the changes is the way that we now see sex, the way that female pleasure is foregrounded is probably one of the reasons that there has been such a rise in this genre.
Alex: It’s a publisher’s dream when they can put out a series that regularity and the volume that the writers are working out. And I think sex writing does lend itself to that.
I’m sure that the readers are encountering scenes that have echoes of previous scenes pretty consistently. ’cause there’s only so much variety that you can do. And one of the licenses that it was occurring to me that you get by going into the realm of monsters and myth is that it enables slightly more variety and imagination than any traditional sex scenes.
Elizabeth: When Sarah sent this email to me, it really made me think of the book, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingles. It was reissued recently by Faber. It’s this amazing literary gem that is about this housewife who is incredibly sad.
So she has lost a baby. Her son died in infancy and the book has this melancholic tone and then this amphibious sort of man escapes from a local zoo and appears at her house and. She hides him. And there’s this incredible tenderness that unfolds between them. And there’s this beautiful sex scene where actually not very much is revealed, but what happens is, so she’s been caring for him, she’s been finding him things to wear and things to eat.
And I think that kind of trust and care and tenderness really lends itself to sex scenes very well when you’ve seen that build up between two characters. And it’s this woman who feels so underappreciated and so has lost a sense of her desirability or loveability. And I just, I like, I think it’s so beautiful, that scene, even though not much is shown.
Kate: It’s hard to write about sex. It’s hard for it to be convincing. It’s hard to do it in such a way that it doesn’t jolt you out of the the story that you’re reading. And we notice it when it’s bad. And that’s why for many years, The Literary Review was able to have the Bad Sex Awards where every year they would pull out three or four titles where they found some fairly excruciating passage, which when held up in isolation, it does make you think, oh gosh, yeah.
That’s awful. Yeah. Just embarrassing. They stopped doing it in the pandemic. They said that they felt like things were bad enough, that they didn’t need to inflict bad sex on people as well. But actually, it felt like there was a real sea change where it felt like we want writers to try at this.
We want to read this. It’s important. It’s an essential part of human experience and we don’t want writers to feel like they can’t, that they have to be afraid of trying, having a go at writing it. You know what I mean? It felt like this sort of atmosphere of criticism and negativity around sex writing wasn’t helpful and it wasn’t really what people wanted.
Elizabeth: I always really hated the bad sex awards, which is why when I was at Waterstones Gower Street, one of the first things I did when I started working on the events program there was I set up this good sex writing night to coincide with the awards of that year because I always found it so trite and so ungenerous when it came to writing, because I think that writing about intimacy is something that does require freedom.
But also sex is something that can be awkward, and it can be confusing, it can be funny. There are so many different things that come into play during sex, and that’s probably true of writing sex. Anyway, I just didn’t like it.
Kate: I think the thing to say is it was very tongue in cheek. It was a very literary world joke. And I think it felt like they had a lot of fun doing it. And even now, if you go to the website and you browse through, the excerpts are very funny.
I’m looking at the 27th Bad Sex in Fiction award, which I think was the last one they did 2019, the winners were, the The Office of Gardens and Ponds, and Pax, but they pulled out some excerpts from the other shortlisted books, The River Capture by Mary Costello.
‘He clung to her, crying, and then made love to her and went far inside her and she begged him to go deeper and, no longer afraid of injuring her, he went deep in mind and body, among crowded organ cavities, past the contours of her lungs and liver, and, shimmying past her heart, he felt her perfection’
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of more famously, Eat, Pray, Love. ‘Then I screamed as though I were being run over by a train, and that long arm of his was reaching up again to palm my mouth. And I bit into his hand the way a wounded soldier bites on a bullet.’ And the last one, Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel, ‘The actual lovemaking, was a series of cryptic clues and concealed pleasures, a sensual treasure hunt. She asked for something, then changed her mind. He made adjustments and calibrations, awaited further instructions.’
That’s just so something so funny about that in the context of the other two.
Elizabeth: So it is funny, right? That is very transactional, but I also think that there’s something so contradictory in this idea of wanting good writing, and then when people are putting an effort into writing, even if it doesn’t necessarily land in terms of feeling sexy or whatever, laughing at it.
Alex: I would say that it left a potent legacy, not least in the way that Twitter writes about men in particular and their attempts at sex writing. I’m sure that you’ve seen, people meme-ing the idea that men write about how women go ‘boobily’ up and down the stairs. But from the writer’s perspective, it can be an intimidating thing to undertake, particularly if you’re ambitious enough to try and write, a narrative point of view outside of your own focus.
To be able to embody and inhabit somebody and think about what it means to navigate the world in their body is at the centre of what it means to do good sex writing, and I’ll maintain that. Good sex writing doesn’t always exist to titillate. That’s been our focus in the conversation so far because that is functional purpose of the romantic novel, beyond being generally entertaining and living out all of that wish fulfillment. But sex scenes in books that have stayed with me, most powerfully, and the things that I look to for reference material, are always sexual interactions that are formative for the characters.
We think of the Ferrante trilogy and Nino’s father, abusing Elena for the first time is the one that I think a lot of readers would be able to point to and say, that is a tremendously engaging and powerful, scene of sexual awakening whilst at the same time being horrifying. And it ticks all of the boxes for what good sex writing should do, in my opinion, or all of the desire that’s present in Chris Kraus’s I love Dick, despite the fact that it’s epistolary and all told on reflection and heavily embellished with the reflective accounts of it, to me those tick the boxes without necessarily veering into the territory of, needing to meet any neat categories about sex writing that an award like that is trying to effectively measure.
Kate: And I think. They were always quite clear to clarify that it exists to flag up bad passages about sex in otherwise excellent novels. That was the sort of, I think, funny aspect to it was that they weren’t saying that’s how they redeem. Yeah. They were just saying, oh, what a shame it had this terrible piece of …
Alex: That’s not what gets the headline, though.
Kate: But you are absolutely right to bring us on to, I think what’s the more interesting thing about sex writing in books it feels to me as a reader, it’s something where it can and should form a very important part of the story because it’s such a fundamental thing that happens to all of us and. The books that I thought of when the subject came up and the ones when I, was asked to contribute to the article, I immediately sent the poor journalist who’d asked me for my opinion a list of about ten things ranging from, as I said at the beginning, the quite cozy, bland – in the end I think she went with The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary…
Elizabeth: You said she went with the safe option and you were slightly disappointed, weren’t you?
Kate: Because I knew she was asking lots of other people, and I suspected that mine would be one voice in the mix, and sure enough like that, it’s great. As a beautifully crafted romantic comedy with very tender, delicately written, believable sex, woven into it, which you really yearn for both of these characters.
And when it comes, you’re just happy for both of them. It’s really lovely. That was the reason I thought that was a nice example to flag up. But then, you’ve got all kinds of things like, just thinking about Miranda July, which most people are probably aware of, even if they hadn’t read it yet.
But All Fours, her recent, autobiographical novel. It’s so interesting, Alex, you’ve flagging up earlier this
Alex: I loved that book
Kate:. Yeah. This trend as auto fiction has crept into everything, hasn’t it? To fiction, history, to everything. Now it almost contains a bit, and I love that ’cause I just want to read human stories, written by humans about human things like, so all of that, to me, is a great joy. But yeah, Miranda, July, let’s take a little detour to that motel room of hers and the things that went on there.
[audioclip]
Kate: That to me, although I found it sometimes eye-wateringly explicit, still to felt to me like very convincing account of one woman’s sexual experiences and I was very happy to read about them.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I really love that book and I love Miranda July so much. I remember reading it on the tube and being like, oh my gosh, this is almost too much to be reading this on the tube. What I love though about Miranda July is the kind of wackiness to her and I think sometimes she will say things that many people would not comfortably say, and she puts the reader into quite an uncomfortable position a lot of the time. But I love that, and I love the kind of fearlessness in her curiosity about her own body and what turns her on. And also in her newsletters, there’s all this stuff about, crystal dildos. And I love that kind of experimentation, and I actually think that’s really what we need. Especially from and for women because as I say, so many of us have grown up under the male gaze.
I think that this idea of women recalibrating their desires and working out what turns them on is really important. And also the idea of slowing off the shamefulness of the female body. What I especially think of in All Fours is, the man the protagonist meets who she’s intensely attracted to, they don’t actually have sex, but they are attracted to each other.
And there’s this incredible scene where he puts her tampon in for her. And I loved that. I thought it was so amazing.
Kate: Yeah. Because she’s married and he is also married. Yes. But they both recognize this mutual attraction. They basically achieve intimacy without actually having sex. And the way that this is done, I agree with you, I thought that was an extraordinarily powerful scene and also felt very taboo breaking, this tampon being the central element of it.
Elizabeth: Also, the comparison point is that in Fifty Shades of Gray, which I have read, I’m afraid there is also a tampon scene where Christian Grey, so they’re in the bath and what’s the main character called? I can’t remember…
Alex: Anastasia
Elizabeth: Have you read it too?
Alex: No, I just really fancy Dakota Johnson.
Elizabeth: They’re in the bath and he’s by the way, you can have sex when you’re on your period. I’m gonna take your tampon out. And he takes it on, like flings it and like it’s so mechanical and unsexy. So for me, this was amazing to read this Miranda July scene, I just loved it.
Kate: Alex, there aren’t many men I feel I could sit and comfortably have a conversation about the sex scenes in Miranda July’s All Fours
Alex: What a compliment, I’ll take that.
Kate: But you must feel slightly lonely. Are there many men that you’re aware of who are happily hoovering up this kind of stuff?
Alex: My social group of men don’t really read literary fiction in general. My pub friends that have a lot of influence over me being able to get an authentic voice for the football book, are quite distinct in their interests versus that. But the male reader of literary fiction does exist and increasingly have, really elevated expectations for what good quality should feel like. And I think that it’s commensurate that we try and rise to that and deliver good well-told and well-thought-through experiences. I think that the publishing machine is a lot better equipped to market to women.
And I think that it’s a lot better equipped for commissioning editors to recognize what is going to fulfill any kind of sexual fantasies and interests of their primary readership, which is going to be overwhelmingly women. I think if you look at the data, literary fiction is something like 75 to 80% consumed by women.
But that doesn’t mean that, a novel like The First Bad Man, which is Miranda July’s one about really weird cross-age-gap lesbian relationship that’s predatory in a lot of ways, isn’t going to land for people because they don’t immediately relate to things. I would push back on the notion that the rise of auto-fiction is down to people’s appetite to relate to things.
I think it’s down to them having the opportunity to tell stories that would go otherwise untold. We’re all bored of the same stories. Hollywood feeds us enough of that recycling old ground. The novel as a form and a medium gives us opportunity to really innovate in ways that something like Miranda July’s writing is right on the modern edge of, she does stupendously imaginative things.
Whether or not it has autobiographical elements to it is of little interest to me. It’s the telling and exploring of those really strange and quirky relationships in tremendously talented ways with a whole load of literary merit. That means that it deserves all of the attention that it got.
Kate: Yes. I mean it’s an interesting one though because then once you’ve read it and you are interested in Miranda July and you look her up, the first thing you find out is that actually so much of it does seem to very closely parallel her own life and her own experiences.
And then you’re all more interested. Then you go to Instagram and before you know it, you’re pole dancing in a leotard.
Elizabeth: Are you in the group chat though? There is a group chat on Substack if you wanna join in.
Kate: What the Miranda July group chat?
Elizabeth: Yeah. It’s the place to be.
Kate: Something to aspire to maybe. I was interested to talk about, ’cause my mind often goes to quite dark places. Another book that immediately popped into my mind when I was asked to recommend a book, a kind of hot book was Nobel Prize winner, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which was the book that really here in the UK first put her on everyone’s radar.
It won the Booker International, I think that’s why I read it. We did it for book club. It was one of the first books we ever did on the podcast.
Alex: It’s a great choice for a book club. Yeah. Nice and short.
Kate: Ugh. Such a good book club book ’cause it’s so interesting and it’s about a woman who makes what seems like quite a straightforwardly assertive decision that she will no longer eat meat.
[audioclip]
Kate: And in the context of her life and the society that she lives in, this is incredibly transgressive and is viewed as such by her family. And they’re all terribly negative about it, and really put a lot of pressure on her to conform, as does her husband. And so sex in this book, and the first way that we encounter it, is incredibly troubling because her husband basically asserts his conjugal rights with her and effectively rapes her.
And it’s deeply shocking when you read that’s what’s happening. And yet she’s somehow blank. It’s like she doesn’t really respond in any way. There’s a neutrality to her response. It’s you just don’t quite know. She’s just accepting her fate. On the one hand, there’s this bid to assert herself and what she wants and desires.
And on the other hand, she’s in this restrictive situation. And then the second part of the book is about the brother-in-law who becomes completely erotically fixated on the fact that she has this birthmark on her skin. Which he sees, he observes this can’t get it out of his mind. And this then spirals into this sort of art performance where he ends up painting her body with these floral designs and becomes so erotically aroused by this, that he needs to possess her sexually.
And first of all, he wants to witness her being possessed by someone else. And so he tries to hire this artist actor who will he can film them. The artist actor, is like, ‘What? Hang on a minute. Like what?’ He’s the voice and reason. He’s ‘What is going on here? I’m not taking part in this.’ And then things then move on between the brother-in-law and our main character where in the end it’s consensual, but it feels very borderline. It’s consensual in that she also desires this, but at the same time there’s something coercive about it, which is really troubling.
But the scene, where this takes place I think is one of the most powerful and erotic things I think I’ve ever read. I was so struck by it when I read it And I think it’s because it’s tapping into so much, the addition of the sexual element, it just heightens everything about it.
And then it goes to this third section, which is very strange and very sad, where she’s effectively wants to become organic. She wants to turn into a tree and it then becomes slightly opaque as to what’s actually happening . It’s such a powerful book, but it seems to me that sex is such an important component of it.
It’s written about so beautifully and in such a way that feels so true to the text. And the things that happen between the characters in the text and the emotional dynamics of everything that doesn’t in any way jar or jolt you out of it or feel like it’s something weird to be reading about. It just feels so right to me.
And I feel like that’s an example to me of where the writing about sex is so much a part of why the book is good.
Alex: I think you’ve articulated it brilliantly and there’s so much of that book that where one thing leads into the next with such grace and elegance and all of it is very embodied and it’s no coincidence that the instigating event for that has to do with the denial of flesh.
Explicitly. That’s what vegetarianism is. And then there’s a defilement that’s completely analog to that. It’s a beautifully crafted thing and it’s a real great selection for any book club this year. I would say the odds on favorite that I’ve read for the same prize is Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa.
Kate: Oh, I have heard about this. Yeah. But tell the listeners, ’cause they may not know.
Alex: So this is a novel about a severely disabled woman who is very affluent and lives with a lot of privilege in a care home, but fills her time by writing erotic fiction on commission for people.
[Clip from audiobook]: Grasping the wet handrail. I lowered myself down onto the shower chair. The only thing that I had on was a disposable mask. Even when it was suzaki bathing me, it would always strike me how perfect it was to wear a mask while in the nude Tanaka dressed in a blue polo shirt and shorts, picked up the shower head and began to wash me.
Starting from my feet. The bowl in which my feet rested began gradually filling up with warm water. It let the shower run to heat up the water before I came into the bathroom. It was true. He was a diligent worker from my legs. He moved up to my stomach, torso, shoulders, then moved round behind me, washing my back.
With no corset on, I propped myself up, clinging into the frame of the [00:35:00] chair with arms straight as rods, keeping dead, still setting the shower head down. Tanaka Leathered. The soap with wash cloth then supported my shoulders. The arms he scrubbed with a cloth were poles, chest been encased in skin. Ma chest, which the corset had prevented from developing was like a vacant plot of land.
A pair of brown nipples purged a top, a set of protruding ribs. The reason that Mki didn’t like big breasted woman was that his mother had very large purge breasts. My mother had been the same. My rib cage, I. Which found itself thrust into the limelight after the leading actress had dropped outta the role.
Jutted out from my body with so much enthusiasm that it hang there, like a sheer cliff face with no landing inside below with my upper body floating amid air, the left side of my pelvis dug into my hollowed out [00:36:00] flank. My upper back, my left leg, my right leg, the soles of my feet. The cracks between my toes when he’d finished lathering every inch of my body in soap.
Tanaka picked up the shower head again, and it began to rinse it away. If water came in through the opening of my track, I was in trouble. Tanaka stood his hand by my clavicle, so was the shielded from the shower spray. I assumed that Suzaki self isolating at home had sent him tips on how to do it. I didn’t look at Tanaka and had no interest in the expression on his face.
I imagined he felt a similar disinterest towards my body. Unlike the non-consensual care administered by the opposite sex that took place in heavy handed healthcare facilities and hospitals. This was a situation I had consented to. Disabled people were not sexual [00:37:00] beings. I had ascent it to the definition that society had created to do so.
I had fed myself a convenient lie. Fortunately, the times dictated I had to wear a mask, which prevented the lie from revealing itself. I stood up so that he could finish rinsing me off now at 165 centimeters in height. I found myself looking down at him. 34 years of age, 155 centimeters in height. I recalled reading these figures on his CV six months previously, and a lower lid of one of my eyes twitched.
There was no need for me to remember such details. No need for me to remember his first name. His task impelled him to look up at me and our eyes met. Neither of us dropped her blank expressions. [00:38:00] He passed me the shower head and while he was turned away, I washed my private pants in the usual order.
Alex: It’s quite wonderful. And then one of the major events in the book, without giving away too many spoilers, she has a voluntary sexual interaction with a person who is meant to be a carer for her.
And the way that it manifests and she expresses her desire is sublimely written, but absolutely horrifying with how it’s expressed.
It’s another really short read. I think it’s just over a hundred pages long and you can get through it in one sitting, but it will stay with you for a long time.
Elizabeth: Interesting. I think what you are both talking about is something a bit more layered, but I have to say, I do think that there is quite an art in writing a bad sex scene as in writing bad sex.
I’m reading The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall. And Sarah Hall is a writer who writes sex incredibly well. And it’s very the way she writes about sex feels very primal. She really taps into kind of like the carnality that is in all of us. And there’s a lot about wolves, so it all makes sense. But there is this very bad drunken sex scene where there’s a lot of it’s just so clunky and clumsy and it doesn’t work.
Kate: Yeah. This feels like a sub subcategory now.
Elizabeth: But do you want to talk about bad sex writing now? When you were talking about The Vegetarian, you are talking about where it feels like there, where sex writing feels like it’s a natural part of the book, where it feels congruous with the writer’s style and the subject matter. So it just flows and it fits, it teates nicely. And I think that one writer we want to talk about is Curtis Sittenfeld, who is an incredible writer with many fans. And I think that she lays bare all of these resentments, these motivations, all of these deep-seated things in human behaviour with a really analytical eye.
And yet when she writes sex, it’s so embarrassing. It like, it feels so jarring.
Kate: The obvious normal of hers to say is Rodham. The problem with Rodham was, I think, not necessarily that the writing about sex was bad, but that it was just vividly Hillary and Bill. And I read a piece where she was talking about how that was really important to her and how it was really important as a feminist to reclaim Hillary’s sexuality and to allow that for her.
And it was like, yeah, fine, isn, but it was just so excruciating. Listeners, we did a podcast episode on Rodham, and you can go back to Laura and Phil and I basically falling about over the over the sex scenes. But that was why that felt really awkward.
It felt like walking into your parents. It was a very uncomfortable experience.
Elizabeth: Oh my God. Yeah. So for a while with Curtis Seinfeld’s sex writing, I actually wondered if it was deliberately bad. Or she was deliberately [00:41:00] making it feel awkward because it was Hillary and Bill.
But also because in her book, American Wife, which is based on George Bush and Laura Bush. And again, the sex in that is so cringey because she’s oh, fabulous sex. But it’s actually George Bush.
But also, in her book Eligible, which is a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice.
Kate: Oh, I couldn’t read that. I couldn’t bear that book. I found it unreadable.
Elizabeth: It’s quite a silly book anyway, but I really enjoyed it. But so Elizabeth and Darcy, so Darcy is this like incredible surgeon and Elizabeth is very sensible and has moved back to her family home to help her parents and.
So Darcy and Elizabeth loathe each other, but they’re always going running in the morning, not together, that they keep running into each other. And then one day they are both really sweaty from being running, and then they go back to one of their houses and have ‘hate sex’. I’ve put scare quotes around that, which the listener obviously can’t see, but it frustrated me so much because I was like, why this idea of hate sex seems so unsettling to me.
And when you read actual Jane Austen, there’s so much in just someone taking off a glove or something like that. There’s so much loaded into these tiny, subtle things that it just felt so crude. And I think, it frustrates me about Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing.
Kate: Yeah. Although Romantic Comedy…
Elizabeth: No, that was embarrassing. Again, great flirting. Great flirting. I was just trying to remember, I was trying to remember. Oh my God. The flirting is amazing and it has this real kind of screwball comedy esque feel, and it’s very quick, snappy dialogue. And then you get to the sex and again, it’s just so cheesy.
It just doesn’t feel true to me.
Coming up our recommendations for books where we feel the writing about sex enhances rather than detracts from the novel as a whole. But first, you may have noticed an advert or two in this episode. If you’d prefer to avoid those you can come and listen to the episodes ad-free over on Patreon. Patreon is a nifty platform that allows people to support the shows that they love – you can listen via the app or in your own usual podcast player via the RSS link, and don’t worry, I give you full instructions for how to set this up. But it’s not just ad-free episodes. You’ll also get The Book Club Review weekend, the extra show I make just for subscribers that’s a topical mix of news and interviews with reader friends and book-world folk. You’ll have full access to our chat groups where you’ll be able to swap book recommendations with me and other Book Club Review listeners. It’s an amazing community there and I get so many good book tips. And if you want to come and talk books with me in person at the higher tier you can join the monthly book club. We meet on the last Sunday of every month over Zoom, which I then make into a special catch-up episode for anyone who couldn’t make the live discussion. Next up for is Perspectives by Laurent Binet, enticingly described as a ‘historical epistolary detective novel, stuffed with real-life Renaissance artists behaving badly’. Head over to Patreon.com/thebookclubreview for all the benefits and how to sign up.
Now it’s back to Elizabeth and Alex. If we’re not reading Ice Planet Barbarians, what are the books we think explore sex in brilliant, novel ways.
Alex: Fiona Mosley, who’s better known for Elmet, wrote a wonderful novel about sex work called Hot Stew set in Soho. Highly recommended about the politics of sex work. There’s a novel by Alyssa Nutting called Tampa, which is an inversion of Lolita. It’s about a predatory school teacher perving and lusting after teenage boys.
And it does a brilliant job of centring that in Florida and American culture.
Kate: Do you need to have read Lolita to appreciate it, or can you just read it on its own? I say this as a person who hasn’t read Lolita.
Alex: Something is lost, but it wouldn’t take it away from it entirely.
But it’s funny in a way that Lolita is explicitly not funny. And I dunno what that says about the quality of the writing or the mindset of how that’s a very gendered conversation, but that’s thoroughly recommended. And then I’ll throw in somebody who I’ve had the privilege of sharing this publication cycle with, that’s Curtis Garner in his novel, Isaac, which is a wonderful teenage story about exploring gay sex apps and having bad and toxic relationships and still having salvation and hope on the other side of it.
Kate: New to me except for Fiona Mosley, who I had read. I enjoyed Elmet. How about you, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth: I felt that I absolutely had to talk about Sally Rooney because I really think that. There aren’t many people who write sex as well as she does. I think that Sally Rooney in general is so good at writing about relationships and intimacy and the different things that colour them.
The past experiences that people have had and the ways they have been hurt, all the different things that people bring into a relationship.
I was really trying to work out how her sex writing works, what makes it so good. And I think the thing is there’s nothing over embellished.
She isn’t trying to write really florid, over saturated with metaphor descriptions of sex. The simplicity of the language is incredibly elegant and it also feels very true to how people think, especially with her most recent novel Intermezzo, which is this stream of consciousness style. It’s about two brothers, Peter and Ivan and their relationship with each other, but also their relationships with other women.
And the relationship I particularly love in that book is the relationship between Ivan, who is a competitive chess player and he’s quite socially awkward and he is a bit of a loner.
And he meets this woman called Margaret, at a chess tournament. And she, so she’s described in the book blurb as an older woman. When I was reading the book, I was reading it on my 36th birthday and it turned out that she was 36. And I was like, what? Anyway, so there’s this huge age gap between them.
But the thing is, when they meet, there’s clearly a chemistry and an attraction between them. And so when they go back to the. Place where he’s staying and he asks her to come inside, both of them recognize that the situation feels embarrassing and it feels awkward, and there’s this real it’s very funny and sweet. And Ivan is talking a lot about how awkward and embarrassed he feels. But the thing is, it’s also so erotic because Sally Rooney breaks it down so beautifully into exactly how they’re feeling.
And it’s almost I feel like with a lot of writers, when sex is happening and everyone’s tearing off each other’s clothes, it’s almost like the writing speeds up. But with Sally Rooney, it’s almost like it slows down. And so you have these beautiful sentences that I underline loads of stuff and I just love this ’cause I think it really encapsulates why this is so good with the kind of overlap of massive attraction, but also awkwardness. I really think that you can’t go wrong with Sally Rooney when it comes to sex writing.
Kate: It’s funny, isn’t it? ’cause that felt to me like the real cultural watershed. When Fifty Shades of Grey came out, everyone was secretly reading it on Kindles, on their trains, Uhhuh. And now everyone’s openly reading things on trains and not worrying about it because you know, why not?
Alex: Quite right. We are British!
Kate: You talking about Sally Rooney, who I think there’s such a sort of beautiful intimacy to the way she writes I agree. She’s peerless, isn’t she? She writes about sex so beautifully, but that made me think of another writer who I think also writes wonderfully about sex. And that’s Leïla Slimani. Have you read her Alex? The very famous one of hers is called The Nanny. I’m hesitating. Yeah, because it’s called Lullaby.
Elizabeth: It was called Lullaby in the English publication
Kate: That’s right, The Nanny in the US, in French.
So Lullaby in its English form and it’s horrific story about a nanny based on a true-life thing that actually happened about a nanny who kills the two young children that are in her charge. I was having a chat with someone earlier on today and we were talking about that book, and this person I was talking to was saying she hadn’t been able to read it.
And I was trying to say, even though it’s so awful, the subject that you feel like you couldn’t possibly face it, it’s not really what that book’s about. And that’s one of the wonderful things about it is it’s about money and about class and about privilege and all of that, and the way that she manages to write that novel about this subject is just extraordinary. Anyway, so loved her from that. And then I went on to read the first two books in her trilogy that she’s currently working on, which begins with the country of others. It’s the story of the different generations of her family, or it seems to be based on her family starting with her grandparents and their life in Morocco. And the second book Watch Us Dance. And it seems to be it’s based on her own family. And it starts with her grandparents’ generation in the first novel. Her grandmother Matilde and her husband, and their relationship, which is very intense and very physical and the way that sex is written about. And then it moves to the next generation in the following book. And it just felt so, it’s so effortly woven in.
I just think she’s such an underrated writer. I wish I heard more people talking about how great Leïla Simani is ’cause she’s so good. And there are so many things I feel are like really lauded that I don’t think are nearly as good. Sorry, my like, plea for people to read Leïla Simani, but she’s in a class of her own, or maybe not in her own, but she’s in a class with these writers that we really think are exceptional.
And she is right in there. And yet her name I feel doesn’t often get mentioned and that’s a real shame. Have you read her, Alex?
Alex: I haven’t, no. I’ve seen Lullaby everywhere. I think I’ve had it on a wishlist for quite a while. But yeah, it’ll go to the top of the list.
Kate: I wonder whether maybe it’s ’cause the Country of Others trilogy hasn’t been finished yet.
And of course, the person I was talking to earlier reminded me her first book. Which I haven’t read inconveniently for this podcast, which I’m now really interested in, is called Adele and apparently is about a woman who is feeling frustrated with her relationship with her husband, and so goes off and has various sexual adventures and apparently it’s all very Miranda July-esque. Like a pre-Miranda July.
Alex: While you were speaking about Intermezzo. So I remember that the relationship that Margaret has exited from and the presence of her ex-husband in that novel is definitely the type of thing that I was aspiring to write in terms of a present.
What I said earlier about there being a lingering threat without it being explicitly manifest or having any reasonable repercussions, her reputation and integrity and the small village where she’s based. And Ivan as a disruptor to that. It’s really potent in a way where it feels like it has consequence to them, a human level without them dangling a knife over your neck in a way where it makes the rest of the novel an appetizing, and every scene with them, that relationship as its focus be coloured by it, they’re still able to relax in amongst themselves.
Kate: You’re both wetting my appetite to read it. It’s one of my – I did a show recently with an American podcaster and they did a lovely episode on books they called benchwarmer books, which is obviously this US term.
Alex: Lovely football term. Exactly right.
Kate: Do we have it here? Because I wasn’t really familiar with it, but basically yeah it’s those players who are good, they’re in the team, but they tend not to get played. But I love this applied to books. It’s those books that we have on our shelves. And we want to read them. They’re good enough to be there and we really want to get to them, but they, for some reason we never quite … and Intermezzo for sure. So it is been on my shelf since it came out and I have not yet got round to it …
Alex: Oh, it’s a chunky one as well.
Elizabeth: I was gonna say that you can’t call Sally Rooney a bench warmer.
Kate: No, it’s just she has a she in that way that, it’s been sitting there. I’m dying to read it and yet I haven’t yet managed to.
Elizabeth: Surely Sally Rooney is in your starting 11
Alex: She’s an impact sub at this point.
You come on save the year when you’re having a fallow period in terms of literary quality,
Kate: Can I talk about – the last thing I wanted to flag up – all these things keep rushing to my mind, actually. The one thing I feel like just must be mentioned is the Canadian classic by Marianne Engel, which is called The Bear.
Have you read The Bear? I haven’t read that, Alex, The Bear?
Alex: I’m afraid not.
Kate: No. So I was really intrigued by The Bear, mainly because the main character is a librarian anyway. The Bearis actually really good. It’s a very strange, she ends up getting this job as a kind of archivist and she has to go and work on this remote island.
This is in Canada, so it’s like in the Canadian wilderness. It’s this remote island, this uninhabited house, where yet there is this library that’s been abandoned and she’s been contracted to go in there and catalog what’s in it. And while she’s in this place enjoying kind of the solitude actually.
And I think the sort of change of pace and the nature, this gets taken to the extreme that she starts to form this relationship with this bear. And the funny thing about the book and the way that it’s written there’s two funny things. One is that the relationship becomes physical, as in …
Alex: I didn’t expect it to go in this direction.
Kate: And the other is, the bear isn’t a metaphor. It’s really a bear. The book is very clear about this.
Alex: It’s so Canadian,
Kate: At every moment you think it’s going to become metaphorical and it never does. Okay. And I recommend The Bear. It’s, I actually think it would be a really interesting book club pick.
But the one I wanted to talk about actually, interestingly, going back to what you were saying Elizabeth, about almost like good writing about bad sex is The Snowball by Bridged Brophy.
So this is a vintage … when was this written?
Elizabeth: Wasn’t this in the eighties? I think it’s eighties. The original 1964
Kate: Yeah. But it was reissued and that’s why we ended up rereading it, ’cause this lovely new edition came out published by Faber. Yeah. And it has a very smart cover.
Elizabeth: So for a long time before that, this book was actually like completely out of print. And when I worked at Waterstones Gower Street, we did this book for our forgotten fiction book club.
Did you? Oh. But the thing that was problematic was that we were running this book club in a bookshop where you could buy books, but you could not buy that book.
Kate: It’s such a funny one because we did it for the podcast. I guess it must have been a book club pick And I actually didn’t like it that much when I read it.
It’s, most of it takes place at this party in a country house and it’s a masquerade and. I just didn’t really get on with it. And it’s, it, the whole thing references Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, which I just don’t really know that much about opera.
And so it felt like this sort of very clever cultural frame of reference that was completely lost on me. And it builds this tension between the main character, the woman who’s attending, the guest who’s attending this party, and this man in a mask that she meets and this incredible kind of free song between them.
And they keep like meeting and having these conversations and then parting again and then coming back together. And it all actually then builds up to them leaving together. Going back to his flat and then having sex. You do actually get this incredible build and then you get this kind of consummation.
And what’s really interesting about it, given the time it was written, is that the woman is very much it’s very much sort of her perspective, her point of view, how she feels about it, and the fact that she actually, of the two of them isn’t prepared to pursue it. [00:55:00] So she is the more powerful one in this relationship.
And then I read it again because we were talking about books festive books and it takes place over New Year and the snow falls and it’s all very atmospheric. So I read it the second time and actually the second time I really liked it and then I remembered it again. I picked it up again and all I meant to do was like flick through it and I found myself reading it again.
I. For the third time for this episode, and I’m now a huge snowball fan. Wow. I love this book. I think it’s really great because it’s so clever, like intellectually it’s so clever, and yet it’s also incredibly sensual and you really believe in these characters and you really believe in the conversations that they’re having. And you believe in this arc, this internal arc, that goes on, with this woman and event and how she feels about it.
And I just love it. I think it’s really yeah, I’ve come around to thinking it’s a work of genius. So that’s my third recommendation to snowball.
Alex: It’s a very challenging act to follow, to pitch a book after that bear one that’s gonna be on [00:56:00] my mind for a while. I think that might have to go top of the list instead.
Kate: Elizabeth, did you have another one?
Elizabeth: I really want to talk about Emma Forest’s memoir, Busy Being Free. And I think the thing that’s really interesting about this book is most of the book is about celibacy.
Emma Forrest was married to a Hollywood actor and they lived in this incredible mansion in la and then they divorced and she and their child moved to an attic flat in London. Also that’s the beginning of the Trump presidency. And she decides that she has had enough of men.
And also she is someone who is very conscious that for all of her adult life, she has always pursued feelings of infatuation. And she says, okay, what if I just spend the entire term of Trump’s presidency being celibate? And so a lot of this book, she’s talking about lovers she’s had in the past.
She’s talking about her marriage but she’s also talking about this [00:57:00] experience of female solitude. At the end of the book, she does start having sex again. And she has these dates with younger men, which are, when you get to it, they’re so incredibly sexy because she’s.
Built up this sensuousness throughout the book. She’s a very alluring writer. And she writes in an incredibly multisensory way. So the whole book is soundtrack by David Bowie and George Michael and all of these rock stars. And she writes beautifully about clothes and she commissions these Murano glass stairs.
Maybe I’m imagining that, but I think it’s true. Wow. But she commissions this beautiful staircase for this flat because she is looking after a child, but she also wants something beautiful. And she talks about looking at the moon out of her window and finding the moon deeply sensuous. So then when you get to her having this sex with this young man who she calls Q who’s 27 you are looking forward to sex coming into play
Also this whole book, this kind of period of celibacy is exactly what I was talking about earlier where you are repositioning yourself outside of the male gaze. So she says, before she used to always look for being desired, but now she’s interested in desiring. And so she talks about the sex and she talks about not feeling any shame, but also what I love is there is this fearlessness that she shares with Miranda July, although not quite so wacky. But she’s talking about sexting this guy, and this is the bit that I really enjoy. I’ll see if I can remember it by heart. She’s talking to one of her mum friends about sexting and she’s saying.
She sent this message to him saying that she wants to keep his semen in a lock around her neck so that she can taste him whenever she wants. Which I quite enjoy because it’s quite filthy. It’s quite sexy.
Kate: You should see mine and Alex’s faces at point.
Elizabeth: I just love the humor in that and the frankness and the way that she talks about looking at porn and things like that, and she’s very candid about her relationship with kink.
I found this book so incredibly liberating and I found it so that afterwards I felt hungry to read things that were like that. And I couldn’t find anything else. I’m sorry to say, but she does have a novel coming out soon.
Kate: Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of that one before.
Alex: It’s a bad title, isn’t it?
Busy Being Free I’m not sure if I would like that, but definitely. It sounds interesting and and one to look out for.
And so we’ve given you a few recommendations. And of course, the other book that we would heartily recommend both Elizabeth and I, who really enjoyed it, is Greatest of All Time by Alex Allison which is just a fantastic read.
Alex: Thank you so much. Not just for football fans.
Kate: Thank you for joining us and both of you i’ve really enjoyed discussing this subject with you. I feel … I was gonna say satisfied, but I feel like what be said I think you can say
Elizabeth: you need to do a part II
Kate: I feel satisfied for now. And yeah, until next time. Thank you both very much.
