Coming together
"For a first novel, what do you have other than the cover? No one has heard of me," [Melanie Abrams] said two days later over coffee at a shop near her childhood home in Woodland Hills. Eight months pregnant, Abrams wore a demure wrap dress and thick-knit sweater and donned a soft brown bob, looking nothing like the writer of a bondage-spiked book.
And so Abrams was worried that, as a first-time novelist, she'd be seen as a "sex writer," with the reader's lone gratification as her primary purpose. She tried to strike a balance, she said, by focusing on Josie's complexities and avoiding pornographic cue words of the four-letter kind, aiming to "give pleasure in a couple ways" -- literary and sensual.
"We don't go into reading a literary novel with hopes of being titillated," she said. "It's unfortunate, because books are supposed to be read for pleasure."
"You can't determine what you're going to write," she said. "Maybe you're repelled by it, maybe you're attracted by it. For whatever reason, it's yours."
"I don't know if you can write literary fiction these days and pretend sex doesn't exist," [Susie] Bright said.
Susannah Breslin, ReverseCowgirlblog.blogspot.com blogger and author of the short-story collection "You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?," compared the highbrow publishing world to "the frigid girl at the party who's not sure if she wants to jump into the orgy."
She cited the difficulty of writing sex well as one reason that racy literary fiction doesn't always make it past publishers. "Sex is so not about language. It's the body, it's primal, it's passion," Breslin said.
The problems of language may be why the divide between literary sex and erotica is so stark -- beautiful or intellectual language may not be titillating language, and if climax is the goal, even the best writers' words can't compete with an amateur's quivering camera.
All that can make erotica writers sound defensive. "Americans don't like their sex and their art mixed together," said D.L. King, editor of the review site EroticaRevealed.com and a writer of BDSM fiction (it encompasses bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism and masochism). "Erotica writers are still treated like the bottom of the barrel."
