Writing My Mother’s Sex Scenes

This is as good an advertisement for a new book as any I've read in a long time.

Ick. Some stories just don't need to be told.

Writing my mother's sex scenes. . Shameful. One more drip from the Great American Morals Meltdown. On the home page of the Times, no less...

Two thoughts: 1) indeed writing about the lives women actually live, be they Emma Bovary or Jennifer Weiner’s mom, is political, and 2) Ms. Weiner, what a clever (op-ed) piece of advertising for your book, with this promise of titillating lesbian sex scenes. Well done on both counts.

And what did your Mom think??

Not sure what the point of this piece is.

Jennifer, you have a blockbuster on your hands!

Why is this writer's push of her new novel part of the front-page op-eds?

"Her new book, 'Mrs. Everything,' comes out Tuesday." ^ Perhaps this key tidbit should be listed at the top of the article? Kind of like a vacuum cleaner salesman knocking at your door and not mentioning that she wants to sell you a vacuum until after two hours of talking: "By the way, I have a new vacuum model coming out this Tuesday." "Oh..."

Every day more and more obscenity is becoming mainstream. Fashion mags tell people it is okay for couples to pee on each other and the NYT has Weiner boasting about imagining and sharing her own mother's sex life. This country is disgusting.

"a critique of the times, a consideration of how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go," and for whom does it, should it, matter, if at ALL? The writer and her sharing of transparent-hidden? The reader, of whatever gender and gender identity? Mom, at whatever point in her life now? Has this creative outcome, in some way violated; crossed a border of mutual trust and mutual respect? Just a novel?

Mainland Chinese women have it all over American women in sexuality. They may not talk about it much, but they do it. Yes, I know from experience, but there's a bit of it in Cultural Revolution female memoirs. One such woman describes, after having sex the first time, with a teacher she admired, how good his semen felt inside her while she was walking home. In American feminism today, I don't think there's such a thing as a woman feeling that way. Men are only patriarchal oppressors who take and take and never give pleasure.

OK, you got me interested. This old male is going to read your book.

I wrote one of the critical reviews on Amazon about one of your recent books....and my review ended up being a top review, and I felt bad about that and still do. In it, I said what I said as only someone who loved another would..... I’ve loved your books, admire your writing, love your stories, and I wanted better, dang it! So with all that I wanted you to know that I’ve already pre-bought this one and I can’t wait until next week when it downloads on my kindle. You keep being you and I’ll keep being me, as in the me that buys all your books..... ...and here’s hoping the Times gets an edit button for us fat-fingered typing with bad eyesight on an iPhone.

I just wouldn't have done that...no matter how "factual" I wanted the story to be...

There are boundaries. You could have demonstrated the full relationship your mother had without the sex scenes. The reader would have understood and, frankly, the reader may have imagined an even deeper love. I'll probably be skewered for this point of view.

What's up with the word "naughty" to describe what? Sex, intimacy, love? Your first book was written 20 years ago and you still use the word naughty? Naughty to me, is being a brat. whether child or adult, in a public situation.

Do you really have to? To paraphrase the writer Christopher Hitchens 'Everyone has a book in them and that, in most cases, is where it should stay.'

Beautiful.

Well? How did she react?

It’s a fact proven by extensive biological research, that many species are immediately consumed by their newly-hatched younguns. Especially prevalent in - dare we mention - East coast Jewish families. This used to be the basis of some pretty good jokes, but less so since the boomerang kids have returned to the ravaged nest, along with their educational debts. Wrote a book once, picked up by a name publisher, but never gave a thought to showing it to my parents. It was non-fiction, but their opinions would not have been encouraging.

Aren't all the things noted as so consequential for women also consequential for men ? That is: who they love, children they have or don't have, etc.-" the personal as political " -as stated in the essay? Although I would say that sometimes men don't think about these things in the obsessive way that women can. I do think that writing about one's mother's sex life seems quite a tricky path to walk-heterosexual or homosexual. And I would have liked to hear the mother's thoughts about the exposure-whether or not she found it fond and valedictory or tawdry and exploitative? I grew up in a time when Mary McCarthy was considered deeply shocking and I recall that she only alluded to the variety of sexual paths that women can walk. Literary shorthand is as far as my children want to go when admitting that I might have a sex life-one can just see them covering their eyes. I doubt I want to know what they really think but the author has given her mother this gift.

I vividly recall reading "Good in Bed" while on vacation, hysterically laughing so hard I was crying. People looked at me as I lay on the chaise lounge by the resort's swimming pool and I could tell they all wanted what I had, something entertaining and joyful. Will definitely read "Mrs. Everything." That said, I'm wondering what was your mother's reaction to that novel, and how she feels about this new one.

It's the same old story -- parents get used by their offspring. Writers are thieves who appropriate you for "material." There are, e.g., many Mommy Dearest slams of mothers. Not many Daughter Dearest, though.

Growing up, whenever the topic of “sex” was mentioned, in all its iterations, my mother expressed her views to my brothers and sister and me in a completely nonplussed and non-judgmental way. How she would have felt about her “sexual experiences” being mused upon in a book by me or anyone else I will not try to surmise. One thing I do know however, is that as an honors English major at college, a voracious reader, a severe literary critic and strict grammarian she would have insisted that any “sexual content” be up to her exacting literary standards. As writing about sex in a convincing way is notoriously difficult and always treads a thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous, I hope that Jennifer Weiner was able to do justice to the topic.

In the age of Orange Julius Caesar, simply to write grammatically is an act of rebellion and resistance. We must be ever vigilant. I note this passage from the article: "I thought about how it would feel when she discovered who she was by way of who she loved...." This should read "of whom she loved." There is no excuse here for the error. Regardless of whether the author thought that the case of the pronoun was determined by the preposition "of," or by the transitive verb "loved," (it's the latter), the result would have been, and should have been, the same. All power to the literate, comrades! By our precision shall it be known who we voted for! (Doh!)

I wrote some books too. Five of them, in fact. I never fancied to show them to mom and dad when they got published. This happened for two main reasons. One, they were both dead by the time I finished my first book. Two, I never got published.

I love this piece. Thank you.

I wrote one of the critical reviews on Amazon about one of your recent books....and my review ended up being a top review. In it, I said what I said as only someone who loved another would..... I’ve lived your books, admire your writing, love your stories, and I wanted better, dang it! So with all that I wanted you to know that I’ve already pre bought this one and I can’t edit until next week when it downloads on my kindle. You keep being you and I’ll keep bring me, as in the be that buys all your books.

What do I know... it just sounds to me like the author is exploiting her mother. Maybe Mom enjoys it, maybe she is one of those extroverts who danced naked at Woodstock. It just sounds to me like the author doesn't have an extensive personal background of experiences and just relies on the easy pickings of the familiar to write about. Then again, what do I know?

The column ended in mid-story! What was her mother's reaction? To the description of her friend? To the explicit scenes? It's all set up, but then nothing... The time frame jumped around, too, or was expressed ambiguously, confusingly. The phrase, 20 years after “Good in Bed”, doesn't seem to make any sense. When was the book written? When did her Mom read it? Who sits there while their mother reads a several hundred page manuscript or book? Somehow, it rings both false and true at the same time. Hardly makes one want to read the book or her books, if she leaves readers hanging, doesn't complete her thoughts, and jumbles time.

Arent we proud of ourselves.

Women certainly do relate differently to their mother's than boys do. The boys in my family knew nothing about sexual relations involving their parents, together of individually. In fact, when I was a lad (don't worry, I'm not drifting into Iolanthe) I had an altercation with another fellow named Andrew when he deigned to enlighten me on the intricacies of menstruation as it related to the women we knew, including my mother. When I appeared before the the assistant principal, a nice lady I had only met once before, when she put a black mark on my entire class because one of us shot her in the posterior with a paperclip and no one would grass on the assailant. Anyhow she asked me why I had struck Andrew she listened, getting red faced in the process, and thereafter send me back to class with the admonition not to get into fights on school premises. If my mother were running a house of ill repute in the next hamlet over, Ferndale to be exact, I wouldn't have known it. Boys in my childhood memory didn't know anything about sex until they were post puberty, at which time one of the adult relatives was assigned the task of bringing them up to speed. In my case it was my Uncle Moe who was a Pharmacist's mate in the Navy during WWII, who explained the physical acts. My father, who had been a Medic in the South Pacific in WWII explained communicable diseases to us and their inquisitional cures. If we actually believed what we were told we wouldn't have believed it of our parents.

The flip side of this is when one's mother is the writer and the kids grow up aware that any misadventure, "may be used in a book"... Children's literature is a special field. On one occasion I bumped into a former college classmate in a park, who greeted me cheerily: "You're Judy Blume's daughter!" I'm not, but my mom and I can enjoy the moment. (She's a librarian, too).

This essay and the comments were so helpful. I am 72 and the older I get, the more I see things generationally. I mean I see how past generations and history affect present generations. I maybe first felt this from my Crow ( Absorokee) friends who talk about having grandparents who would talk about remembering severe group trauma-generational trauma felt in different ways today due to poverty and discrimination and the trauma of missing and murdered indigenous women . I mention that with the idea that history of generations seems important. On a wholly different scale, I think of my mother’s generational history. I have learned to cut her more slack in my memory. That helps me cut myself more slack as well.

Twenty years ago, all I could see was how my mother’s choices had hurt me. Now I can see all the ways the world hurt her — the chances she didn’t have, the doors she couldn’t open. So beautifully put, Ms. Weiner. It's tragic that we often can't see our mothers' humanity, separate from our own hurts, until it's too late.

Ms Weiner, I read and enjoyed your first book all those years ago. And I continue to enjoy your subsequent work. It’s good to have your voice in the mix. Keep it coming, and good luck to you.

Back in my baby reporter days, I sent my mother a published piece I wrote about a feminist artist. The anatomical word for the male member (I’m never sure why is allowed in Times comments, so I will tip toe around it) was mentioned in the article, in the context of it having been hacked off of ancient statues. My mother never mentioned the article. Ever. (The woman was so withering with her backhanded compliments, when she gave them, that I wasn’t sure what response I was looking for. I may have sent it to her to spite her. I don’t recall.) I cannot begin to imagine what she would have done had I presented her with a semi-autobiographical novel full of sex scenes!

Jennifer's opinion piece made me think of what I would do in a similar situation. First, I am not a writer, but I am a reader. Whether it be from a newspaper like the Times, a biography or a novel, I am in awe of the way good journalists and authors can create, can be so gifted and articulate when it relates to the written word. Now for Ms Weiner's piece here, I really can not and should not be critical as to whether she stepped over a line or not re her mother. One reason would be my Catholic guilt which try as I may I can not shake after 74 years of life. I still stammer when I speak about sex after 50 plus years of marriage. And my mom? Yikes, I resist even the thought that she and dad did The Deed. Beyond that, however, when we do research into a much enjoyed novel and its writer, how many times have we read that often characters and protagonists are often reflections of either the creator her/himself or of individuals whom they know well. So, let it be and keep on writing, Jennifer. We need relaxing breaks from our challenging lives, most especially during this Trumpian Age.

Marx and Engels would instantly recognize this trope of inherent antagonism between two classes -- in this case women and men. Genetic determinism. But I don't think Marx and Engels would respect it very much. They would mutter to each other: weak misreading.

Always enjoy this writer's work, but found myself wishing I could know more about how her mom reacted to seeing herself portrayed on the page the second time around, and how it has impacted their relationship.

Jennifer thank you for your books; I enjoy reading them. I think your Mom is probably very proud of all you have accomplished!

I quite understand how Jennifer feels about this issue. I've had the same concerns but with many more people: my ex-colleagues and friends, in my memoir of my life as an international engineer. The first decision: use real names or (EG) Chris ____ or C____? OK real names. I reached out to everyone mentioned. Spent years tracking people down, using snail mail, etc. etc. and finally, everyone agreed, except for three people who no longer want to talk to me, apparently. Perhaps their experiences in my company have left them with PTSD. There were, after all, too many diseases and too many dead bodies and too many revolutions or coups.

I am of two minds here. Fran sounds like a fascinating individual, and her life story certainly lends itself to a written story. And Jennifer sure challenged herself by seeing her mother as a rounded person, not only a parent. But it also feels wrong that someone’s history was coopted by another person, even a loving daughter with good intentions. We all should have a right to privacy, and I don’t think it was right that Fran read about her own self, loosely translated, without having OK’d that first.

An acquaintance, who raised two kids before coming out and marrying her BFF, was pleasantly surprised when her adult son, an aspiring filmmaker, based a film on her circumstances and its effect on both families. The moments he captured made everyone giggle but nothing was more amusing than the fact he changed the names of each and every family member, with the exception of the two moms.

Don't recall having ever been exposed to such an honest self-serving request. Not objecting, just thinking and writing.

When my book Health Proxy (Yuganta Press, 2007) came out I wanted very much to show it to my mother. I wanted her to be proud of me. But I also knew some of the content might disturb her. And maybe even disturb her in a big way. But since she was frail, had a lot of trouble with her eyesight, I thought why not. I could have the best of both possible worlds. She would be proud of me publishing the book and most likely not be able to see much of anything. So I gave her the book. One time on a visit I saw her in the kitchen wearing her glasses, a magnifying glass in one hand, a flashlight in the other, a bright light overhead, reading every word in it. She turned to me with a smile she could barely suppress and said, “Just because you say it’s so doesn’t make it so.”