Writing Sex Was Easy Until I Had to Read It Aloud

This is The Sound of My Voice, a series on the craft, process, and stakes of recording audiobooks.

I’ve never thought of myself as squeamish about sex—I’ve had a lot of it, and somehow I skipped the developmental stage that so many promiscuous girls suffer, the one that tells them their desires are disgusting. But I felt differently when I found myself recording the audiobook of my essay collection Tacky in a soundproof booth, a mic inches from my mouth and bulky headphones covering not just my ears but half my face. I had one male audio engineer in the room with me, politely waiting to hear me record a graphic essay about youthful sex. It was day one of recording. We were just resuming work after a lunch that my publisher had paid for, which we ate together in silence.

My book contains an essay called “The Burial of Samantha Jones,” which is sort of about Sex and the City and a lot about my adolescent attempts at having a fulfilling sex life. Of all the essays in my book, “The Burial of Samantha Jones” was the most straightforward to write. From the moment I started it, I was unstoppable—I encountered none of the internal brick walls or stalling points that so often plague early drafts.

Maybe it went so smoothly because my memories of sex live close to the surface and are easy to excavate. Personal writing is an excavation project as much as anything else, and when I write other essays, I am routinely stalled by an inability to dig up a memory that I know I need. My memories of childhood are fuzzy due to their distance. Adult memories are fuzzy, too, but mostly due to trauma. A conversation that I know was formative turns to dust in my hands when I try to transfer it into an essay; a poignant moment I once shared with a loved one lodges itself impossibly beneath layers of suppression. Sex, though, is the rare thing in my life that’s neither forgettable nor fleeting. Maybe the physicality of it makes it sturdier in my memory, or maybe my exes were right and I really am a sex monster.

The point is that I talk and think and write about sex with ease. I always have. So why was I suddenly so hesitant to read my own writing about sex out loud to a stranger?

Simply put: the essay is graphic. I couldn’t parse out my discomfort about that at first. If a story calls for a clumsy blow job or a threesome gone awry, well, I’m here to serve the story, not myself. I’ve long believed that if a scene or sentence makes me squirm a little, that’s a sign that it’s critical to the narrative. But here in the soundproof booth, I was ready to change my tune. “The Burial of Samantha Jones” would have been a terrible essay without any of the sex scenes in it, but what’s one terrible essay compared to a lifetime of cringing at the memory of reading it out loud to a man I’d never met before? Worse than that, a man I’d never met before who had been hired to listen to me?

I’ve long believed that if a scene or sentence makes me squirm a little, that’s a sign that it’s critical to the narrative.

There it was: the source of the discomfort. A person who buys my book has signed up to read what’s in it. They may complain that the book contains too much sex or they may complain that it doesn’t contain enough or, hell, they may hate my book for any number of other reasons, legitimate and not—but buying my book enters them into a contract with me. I’ve sworn to provide essays that they’ve sworn to try reading. Whether they enjoy the essays after reading them is outside my control or theirs. What matters is that they know, more or less, what they’re getting into: an “irreverent and charming debut.” (Or maybe it’s an obnoxious debut. They’d hardly say so on the book jacket. The point still stands that readers know what’s in store.)

The same couldn’t be said of Eric, the pleasant sound engineer who shook my hand that day and occasionally asked me to rerecord a sentence that I’d said too hoarsely or too fast. Eric inspired the same desire to please that sound engineers have inspired in their clients since time immemorial. These are learned, experienced professionals who have heard it all, and we want to impress them.

I realized, as I pulled my headphones over my ears, that I wasn’t worried about grossing Eric out or making him squirm. Listening to thirty straight minutes of my anal sex talk was his job. He’d heard worse, maybe even that day. But was I providing a good session for him? A dull one? Was his expressionlessness a sign that he was bored or zoning out? Maybe he was just focused, making sure that my s’s weren’t hissy, that my p’s and b’s weren’t popping too much. Here it was, the horniest essay of my collection, and circumstances had reduced it to the stuff of someone else’s average work day. I wasn’t blushing furiously because I was afraid of offending him; I was afraid of boring him. (Sound guys, out of all the guys that there are, are also the guys we’re universally the most terrified to bore.)

It didn’t help that “The Burial of Samantha Jones” was only one of several sexually explicit essays in the second half of my book. I had fingerings and spankings and an endless frontier of deep-throatings left to explore over the next several hours. Eric’s assignment was to stand by my side for all of it, which he did with stone-faced aplomb.

As I read, I wondered what I’d expected. I would have been appalled if my sound engineer had popped a boner or licked his lips at me—what reaction, then, would have felt right? Why did I expect a reaction at all, when I didn’t care about inspiring anyone with my writing about my best friend or my father? I was in an awkward position to be sure, but nowhere near as tense as his. The only thing at stake for me was the fear that my friendly, professional sound guy was bored. If he’d reacted to my endless-seeming blow job talk in a way I deemed inappropriate, worst-case scenario, I could have gotten him fired. I was at work for myself, but he was at work for me.

When I left the sound booth after several hours of sex talk, Eric didn’t say a word about any of it. Just, “Good job,” with a handshake. The remark and handshake both felt perfectly perfunctory, the way they should in a sound-guy-and-recording-artist scenario. I couldn’t imagine ever reading “The Burial of Samantha Jones” out loud again, but then, I hadn’t written it out of any particular burning desire to read it out loud in the first place. My face felt exposed now that it was no longer covered by sweaty headphones; I put on my big sunglasses instead as I emerged onto the street and felt better.

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