Author Adam Wilson talks about writing sex scenes, Louis C.K., comedic novels, and the importance of empathy.
Via adamzwilson.com
Adam Wilson is a writer on the rise. His 2012 debut novel, Flatscreen , about a pasty young loser and his friendship with a former celebrity turned paraplegic drug addict was called "a laugh-out-loud literary debut" (Details) that marked Wilson as "a standout addition to a new generation of writers" (Booklist). His short stories have appeared in journals such as Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and The Paris Review, which awarded him its 2012 Terry Southern Prize. This month his first collection, What's Important Is Feeling , is out on Harper Perennial.
Sex is a notoriously tricky area for fiction writers. Even the most celebrated writers get passages put up for the Bad Sex Award. One thing I love about the stories in What's Important Is Feeling is how fearlessly and also humorously you write about sex. For example, "Milligrams" opens with two lovers using a live lobster for foreplay (before eventually eating it). How do you approach sex in your fiction? And what's your take on the state of literary sex?
Adam Wilson: As far as things that humans do, sex is definitely one of the more entertaining, and I always find it disappointing when writers shut the doors to their characters' bedrooms. A sex scene provides so many opportunities for both conflict and comedy. In movies and pop culture, sex tends to be unrealistically represented as something that happens between two people with flawless bodies while the perfect song plays. Fiction is a place where we can correct those false representations and explore the nuances and variety of sexual experience, which isn't always so black and white as being either "good" or "bad" or "funny" or "sad," and is often all of those things at once. That said, my favorite sex scenes are often the tragi-comic ones, the ones that point to the absurdity of the fact that this sacred act that our entire species depends on, ultimately consists of sweaty naked people rubbing against each other, and putting a funny-shaped appendage into a funny-shaped opening, and also involves other funny things like fluids, AA batteries, feet, hair, wandering pets, and money. From Philip Roth's early explorations of Onanism to Sam Lipsyte's later ones, from Dodie Bellamy's breathless descriptions of orgasms to Ariana Reines' decidedly unimpressed descriptions of dick picks, my favorite sex scenes don't need to turn me on so long as they make me feel something.
Have you ever read William H. Gass's On Being Blue? He has a great quote about how too many authors get bogged down trying to describe every sex step: "I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke-by-stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew-by-chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing." Does that sound right?
AW: I have not read Gass' essay, so it's hard for me to say, but off the bat, I'm not sure I agree with his sex/chicken wing analogy. A stroke-by-stroke copulation story doesn't sound so bad to me, so long as it's well-written. David Foster Wallace, for example, has a couple of sex scenes in exactly this style that are amazing for their attention to the micro-details of the act, the thousands of tiny actions and reactions that make up one bout of boning. But Wallace could also probably have written a pretty compelling chew-by-chew account of eating chicken wings, which one can't say of many other writers. And I guess Gass' point is that the mechanics aren't necessarily the thing you want to capture.
Your fiction writing is very sharp and funny and I know you teach humor writing. Do you count any comedians as literary influences?
AW: As far as direct influences on my fiction, there aren't many, though I do consider Louis C.K. the patron saint of comic pathos, and his standup helps remind me of the ripe combination of humor and misery to be found in the human body's many betrayals. As for what makes me laugh, Eddie Murphy's early standup films, Raw and Delirious. I first saw them at an impressionable age — 16 — during the same week that I lost my virginity. This is how I came to the confused notion that purple leather and fart jokes were the way to a woman's heart. Bill Hicks is another comedian who has had a great impact on me, particularly how unafraid he was of alienating audiences. I should also probably mention that I grew up with a standup comedian for an uncle — Jonathan Katz — though mostly what I inherited from him was baldness, which is especially strange, because we're related by marriage...
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