Brodie Crellin Recommends Six Books With Actually Realistic Sex

Sex is an integral part of a person’s life, but when it appears in fiction it can sometimes feel hesitant or awkward on the one hand, or risky or provocative, deployed as a demand for attention, on the other. Sex doesn’t often emerge as an extended set-piece, but understanding a character’s desires is usually crucial in understanding who they really are. Not necessarily because the sexual world maps directly onto the social one, but because the similarities, differences or distortions can offer an opportunity to articulate something unexpected. In A Sense of Occasion, I wanted to treat the erotic worlds of each character with the same pragmatism, realism and degree of observation as any other part of their lives, and to do so I returned to the writers whose depictions of sex had most closely held my attention.

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Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck

Gluck’s incarnation of Margery Kempe loves too much and is in total denial about the depth and scale of her relationship with God’s son. But that, at least in part, is what gives her crush such a devout and visionary tenor. Jesus messes her around; he teases her, taunts her, and then has Satan touch her on his behalf, forcing her to come with hellish flames engulfing her thighs. Margery’s story takes place in the fifteenth century, but the novel also follow’s Gluck’s own infatuation with L. in 1990s San Francisco, which has a similar sense of desperation. Gluck writes that “Heaven is the total presence at once of my self and my body,” and it might be that Gluck and Margery’s willingness to really embody their desires—dignity be damned—is what allows them both to access such heightened, even religious, experiences of sex. A book that should be read by anyone looking to find the silver lining in their one-sided affair.

Vox by Nicholson Baker

Abby and Jim meet on the phone. They’ve both signed up to an erotic hotline, and the novel follows the shape of their conversation. This couple is horny, open minded, and capable of locating the weird and crooked details that give a sexual encounter its charge. I read Vox on the train, in the space of a few hours, submitting completely to the back and forth between two unruly, associative minds. But the images that linger aren’t explicitly sexual. Baker notices everything—objects, textures and packaging matter in this novel. When I think about this book, what I remember most is the description of the blanket tossed across Jim and his coworker as they masturbate together, I think about the plaid pattern and the way it tents and collapses on top of them. People on Reddit have described Vox as prose porn, which feels unfair. Porn favors universality, simple stories that allow for projection, but in this book, it is the detail, how closely Baker pays attention, that makes the climaxes and connections sexy.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

This book was released in 2010, but it didn’t reach me until 2016. I was finishing university, and in the summer following my final exams I read it three times. With nothing to do I was obviously tuned in to the protagonist’s aimlessness, but it was the blow jobs, rather than the question of how to live well, that mesmerized me. Sheila, the character, takes these blow jobs seriously. She uses them to channel her devotion, which is abject and ugly, and her desire to be close to Israel, and his cock especially, eclipses reason and good sense. I’m thinking of the scene where Sheila dips beneath the covers, because she wants to sleep with Israel’s cock next to her head. It’s so pathetic! So hopeless! And so true to the surprising impulses we reveal in bed.

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

Telephones, in any era, carry a specific erotic potency. Everyone can relate to a character waiting for a phone call, or a text, that feeling of being stuck in a purgatorial gap that won’t end until the other person has made contact. It’s so intense, and carries so much weight, that it’s unsurprising that for Ernaux, the waiting starts to feel like a precursor to the sexual act itself. The sex is brilliantly written in this book—intentional and unabashed—but the strength of Ernaux’s obsession makes every moment feel sexual. Whether she is getting dressed, sitting in the kitchen, or going to the university, each small gesture or decision is implicated in the game of her desire. It can’t really even be argued that this is a game unfolding between two adults. This pair seem incompatible, with little chance at a future, but Ernaux is so immersed in her passion, that she is can quite easily sustain the narrative singlehanded. A perfect object lesson in the distorting impact of good sex.

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

I am one book down with six more to go. So far, Proust hasn’t described any sex, but sometimes the really good sex writing appears when there is no sex at all, only a sexual feeling. Here, a child listening for his mother on the stairs, longing for her to kiss him goodnight, contains the beats of a love affair, and when mother and son are finally united in bed, and the boy describes his “impious and secret finger” tracing a “wrinkle upon her soul,” which in turn brings out the “first white hair on her head,” Proust leaves little space for us to imagine this scene as anything other than an erotic encounter. It’s not just interpersonal either, sex is in the flowers, the trees and the furniture, and when we catch a glimpse of Mademoiselle Vinteuil through the window, with her female lover urging her to spit on the photograph of her late father, the contours and emphasis of Proust’s writing enable us to picture the sexual relationship taking place when the curtains close.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delaney

This book catalogues the changing face of Times Square and is the only explicitly non-novel on this list. In the text Delaney argues for the importance of recognizing the role of sex and desire in public spaces, and charts the closure of the various porn theaters and peep shows located around Times Square in the 1970s and 80s. This book is special for lots of reasons. It shows how vital certain institutions have been in promoting contact between people of different classes and races, and how deeply sex plays a part in this. Delaney describes the sex he has with such precision, while also allowing these descriptions to bleed into reflections on the conversations he’s had, and the sandwiches he’s shared, with the various men he met in these spaces. Sex is at once tender and pragmatic, both necessary and something to savor.

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A Sense of Occasion by Brodie Crellin is available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.