This newsletter is part of what I hope will become an occasional, running series of essays and close readings about writing sex, which is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and was also the subject of the seminar I offered at NYU this past year. You can read the first post, on writing the moments after sex (with reference to James Baldwin, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Kenyon, and one of my own scenes) here. There are also musings about representing sex scattered across other posts, maybe especially the conversation I had with Edmund White last year, and in one of the first pieces I wrote for this space (they were longer back when I only posted once a month), which covered, among other things, a two-man opera about sex work, Trade by Emma O’Halloran.
But before this week’s essay, a few notes:
Some news that can finally be public: the operatic adaptation of my first novel, What Belongs to You, written by David T. Little and starring Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman, will be directed by the legendary choreographer and dancer Mark Morris. The score is gorgeous: David has entered into the novel with extraordinary sympathy and insight; and Karim’s voice has become the sound of the book for me. It will be premiered September 26 and 28 at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center. Please come if you can. There will be a panel discussion on the 27th, and I’ll also be giving a reading on the 25th, as part of the University’s Writers Series. You can find more information about the opera here; tickets will be available in July.
Speaking of Edmund White, several months ago I wrote an essay on his second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, which came out in 1978. That year was a kind of annus mirabilis for gay literature, seeing the publication of two books that would enter the queer canon: Larry Kramer’s Faggots, which is a novel I really don’t like at all, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, which I adore. Edmund White’s third novel, A Boy’s Own Story, would also become a classic. But Nocturnes, despite having fervent devotees, has long languished out of print; I once heard White himself describe it as the most neglected of his novels. I’m hoping that the new edition McNally Editions has just put out will change that. My essay appears in that book as a foreword, and it was also published last week by The New Yorker. You can read it here. (And if you’d like more thoughts about 1978’s queer lit, The Yale Review published my intro to a new edition of Dancer from the Dance not too long ago.)
Finally, my third book, Small Rain, comes out on September 3. Please pre-order by asking for it at your local bookstore, or through any of these links: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon. There are even more links at the Macmillan page.
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Miranda July’s fiction is drawn again and again to the body in crisis. Sometimes that crisis is situational: in “The Man on the Stairs,” a tiny, terrific story from No one belongs here more than you, a woman leans into the dark of a stairwell, where (maybe) a man has been creeping, intending her harm, breathing out “the bitter air that makes women doubt everything.” Sometimes the crisis is medical: the central movement of her debut novel, The First Bad Man, features a traumatic pregnancy and an infant battling for life; it’s one of the remarkable novelistic hospital sequences I’ve read. (I started compiling a list of these while I worked on my own hospital novel.) In fact, I think this middle movement of The First Bad Man goes places art seldom dares, and reaches enormous heights of drama and pathos; it’s one of the great things I’ve experienced in recent fiction. Sometimes the crisis is aesthetic, as in a scene in All Fours where the narrator records herself performing a wild, physically demanding dance, a video she will post publicly on Instagram that is really a private message, or rather a kind of spell, meant to summon a singular other. And sometimes, often, the crisis is erotic.
Sex is a preoccupation throughout July’s career, and it has been much commented upon in discussions of her work—and that commentary has in turn been subject to a lot of second guessing. Is the sex in July’s work really remarkable? Would is seem so remarkable, so shocking even, if it were written by a man? Sometimes the commentary and the second guessing come from the same source, sometimes from the same paragraph, as happened in Alexandra Jacobs’s NYT review of All Fours:
It is gaspingly graphic, sometimes verging on gross (urine, tampons and a suspected polyp — “hopefully benign”— all come into play), and supplemented with masturbation galore. Compelled to read these definitely not twee-rated passages, I briefly considered filing a complaint with human resources. Then I remembered the protracted and messy sex scenes released with such fanfare into the culture by Philip Roth, Harold Brodkey, et al., and decided I was being discriminatory and prudish.
The problem with this is not that it holds July to a different standard than Roth or Brodkey (nice to see him get a Times mention, one worries he’s being forgotten) but instead that it dismisses the whole company in a way that is dismayingly unserious. “Verging on gross,” “definitely not twee-rated,” “filing a complaint with human resources,” “protracted and messy.” Jacobs’s jokiness is a way of holding the sex in these books at arm’s length, not treating it seriously as a resource for art. All of these writers deserve better.
In fact the sex in July’s work is worthy of comment, and there’s no double standard in noting that she’s drawn to the transgressive; there are pages in her books that would make Mickey Sabbath lick his fingers. In “Making Love in 2003,” from No one belongs here more than you, a narrator recounts a series of erotic encounters with a “dark shape,” a nebulous “sexual predator,” who appeared in her bedroom beginning when she was fifteen; as an adult, she believes this force has been reincarnated in her fourteen-year-old special-needs student, with whom she begins a relationship: “Now there was this extra thing, the boy, and the feeling I had carving into my gut, the feeling of wanting to fuck him, as he had fucked me when I was fifteen—into other galaxies.” In The First Bad Man, the narrator finds sexual satisfaction in staging bruising scenarios from self-defense videos with her roommate. Erotic scenes like these are noteworthy, I think; no need to worry about double standards.
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