How to Write an Essay About Sex That's as Lively and Pleasurable as the Act Itself

Since talking about "it" was so taboo in her family, one memoirist realized that to win over skeptics, her sex writing needed to be damn good and honest. These are her tips for getting it right.

This piece is part of a series called Creative Nonfiction Craft Classics, a special collaboration from Narratively and our partners at Creative Nonfiction in which we’re republishing classic pieces on the craft of writing from the Creative Nonfiction archive. This story was originally published as “5 Tips for Great Sex (Writing)” in CNF’s 71st issue.

Illustrationby Jo Zixuan Zhou/Narratively archive

When I was about seven, I heard the word fuck at school. When I got home and asked my father what it meant, he said, “It means making love.” Then he told me not to ask any more questions. Within a few days, a picture book was left out for me. Peter Mayle’s “Where Did I Come From?” features two pudgy characters who have sex under a colorful quilt. The man looks like a pink Pillsbury Doughboy. I remember thinking that everything about the book was utterly bizarre, but the unsaid rule was that I would read it and wouldn’t ask questions. I learned that sex should be kept secret.

As an adult, I write memoir, and I’ve written and published sex-related essays. My mother said to me, about stories I’ve told, “But I never told anyone about that.” And my answer to her was always the same: “Now you don’t have to, because I’m telling everyone.” Hiding my sex life would mean leaving out a large part of my lived experience.

Because talking about sex was taboo in my family, as it is in many families, I realized early on that if I wanted to include sex scenes in my stories, or write about sex head on, it had to be good writing, a way to contend with my mother’s voice, the one saying, “It makes me feel physically ill to read about you and these men.” I have thought a lot about this, and here are some tricks I’ve come up with to get you over the hump to writing sex.

1. Exploit the Messiness

Don’t simplify the emotional intent behind your sex scenes. Maybe your narrator wants to feel loved or make someone fall in love with her. Maybe she wants to manipulate her partner or have an adventure or defy her parents or make sure that her husband finally leaves her for good. Or maybe she’s trying to recapture marital intimacy, as in Sue Fagalde Lick’s heartbreaking but funny essay, “Slipping Away,” about an unexpected vacation from Alzheimer’s. This essay explores the messy emotions within the act itself. The narrator feels giddiness and sentimentality, anxiety and gratitude, emotional and physical pain, and finally love and loss. This essay works because it’s so emotionally honest. In a similar way, B. Pietras’s essay, “Secret Museums,” renders its power from the conflicting emotions of desire—the way secrecy and shame create friendship and intimacy.

The concept of sex, and not just the act itself, can be problematized in emotional ways ways as well. Anne Visser Ney’s “Summers of Urchins and Love” does just this by taking a broader view and weaving together biology and evolution, sexual intimacy and reproduction, and finally the loss of a child, showing how human nature is just one thread in the fabric of all nature, all life.