Coming Out: Writing About Sex

Yes, I am a debutante, in the sense that my first book appears later this month. But there’s the more common sense of the phrase: admitting to your friends and family who you are. Not that it came as news to most of them that I’ve written a novel. I didn’t exactly keep quiet about it when I got “the call.” More like mass emails and telephone calls to everyone I know within about five minutes. If I knew how, I’d have rented one of those planes with a banner streaming behind it just in case anyone missed the news. And I don’t have one of those jobs where it might be embarrassing (not that it appears to have hurt Eloisa James’ career in either romance or academe).
But there is that little question of SEX. I read on a writers’ loop recently of a woman whose family had rejected her for writing what my daughter charmingly refers to as Mom’s Smutty Books. My family are totally supportive but I was the teensiest bit trepidacious about my father who is in his 80s and a very proper man, a good Catholic at that. Long ago he read the first three chapters of NEVER RESIST TEMPTATION and commented that “it’s a bit racy, isn’t it?” Oh Papa (yes, we call him that), you ain’t seen nothing yet.
So when he was visiting me from England this summer and offered to read my page proofs, I was nervous. As he read further my sister and I whispered to each other. Should we warn him what was coming?
In the event we needn’t have worried. He enjoyed the book (his daughter wrote it but he was, of course, judging it completely without bias) and we engaged in a discussion of coitus interruptus as a method of birth control. (Catholics are always very interested in contraception, I find, since they aren’t supposed to use it, My mother had a friend who swore she got pregnant during her period.) When I expressed surprise at his relaxed attitude he said “after all, I have been around a long time.”
I’m not worried about my siblings and their children who have all loyally waited to read the book until they can buy their own copies. I do feel constrained to warn friends and acquaintances who tell me they are going to read it that the book is “somewhat R-Rated.”
Many of them reply “Oh good, I love an R-Rated book.

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