Yesterday, I turned in what should be my penultimate pass on my novel manuscript, and it felt fucking great. It’s such a relief to be even a single step closer to its pub date next spring. Working 40 hours, freelancing, and running this newsletter/mutual aid project—there just isn’t much time for writing books. I’m ready for a little vacation.
At almost two years since I finished the first draft of X, I’m starting to see my second novel as a product of a past version of my self. My interest in people who are in conflict with their desire1 is as strong now as it ever was, but my headspace has shifted significantly. Despite the pandemic, the last couple of years have seen me go through a big breakup with my commitment to suffering, as Bad Gay might put it. I’m happier, and I look forward to the happiness to come.
Is it naive to hope some of that happiness will come from my book? Maybe. Even when I finally snagged an agent, I didn’t know how I would sell to X to a bigger publisher, mostly because I’m a nobody, but also because I wasn’t sure I was brave enough to go through with it. Bigger publisher, bigger audience. That’s more people you’re talking to, more people to whom you’re artistically accountable. X was the right book, but I wasn’t sure it had come at the right time.
This is not simply because its subject matter is perverted and violent in a way that I hope is interesting, and perhaps even challenging; I have great affection for X’s aberrance, but it’s no literary edge case. From Torrey’s pregnancy/HIV metaphors in Detransition, Baby; to Alissa Nutting’s “soulless” woman pedophile in Tampa; to Jackie’s exploration of cuck phenomenology in Darryl; to the complexities of raced and gendered passing in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, contemporary American fiction maintains a healthy appetite for pushing the envelope. Even the (mostly American) writers that I consider to be X’s godparents—Delany, Cooper, Schulman, Puig, DeLynn—are/were far more transgressive than I am, and before I was born, to boot.
So no, it’s not X’s content that made me doubt it: It’s that I’m afraid to be in the discursive crosshairs of writing sex on the platform that even a small publisher like Catapult Books can provide me. In a recent newsletter about similar anxieties, Huw Lemmey couldn’t help but wonder: “How do you write about embodied pleasures that reverberate with such an intense mental space without the dreaded metaphor of Bad Sex? And how do you overcome the anxiety of overstepping the permitted boundaries of your own communities, by writing a different form of bad sex?”
Fear of humiliation or of the problematic is not foreign to DAVID, but as intimate as these newsletters can sometimes be, sharing my fiction feels like more of an exposure than sharing details from my personal life. I’m not overly worried about being identified with the sexual activity or bad ethical behavior in X (which reflects my life in some ways, and not at all in others), which isn’t to say that I’m not a little worried. Why does a made-up story about people who don’t exist feel more implicating than anecdotes about my lifestyle, transition, or messy relationships? Huw approaches an answer, maybe, when he points out that “sex involves a lot of messy, complicated, troubling and unresolved experiences that can be felt when experienced in the body, but which when experienced as a contemplation, upon the page, become a different form of knowledge.” Perhaps the vulnerability is not in the details, but in the attempt at making meaning out of them. We show our bellies not by literally showing them, but by attempting to interpret what it means that they’re laid bare; what it means that we want so much to both deny and satisfy our instincts for lust, desire, and anger.
And then, of course, there’s discourse, and by discourse I mean the intra- and inter-communal conversations in what could very loosely be described as communities of which I’m a part AND the larger-scale conversations in which I am only a subject, not a participant. X is not just about people in conflict with their desire, but more concrete topics: intimate partner abuse among queers, sexual assault, consent, “toxic masculinity,” the dangers of straight women, the instability of identity, transsexuality and genderqueerness, sex work, censorship, state violence, BDSM. The fear of “cancellation” is often deployed as a smokescreen, a way to worm out of “accountability,” to use an overused term, but I think we can agree also that the nexus of internet, bad brains, American culture, and mass trauma has made us all aware of the threat of being misunderstood, willfully or otherwise. As Huw also writes, “Bad faith can take a lot from risk-taking.”
And so editing X has been, in large part, a battle against my natural conservatism, kicked into overdrive by a fear of going too far and hurting someone; of going too far and landing on the wrong side of the discourse; of being misunderstood to the extent that my work is tokenized or dismissed rather than rigorously engaged with. The danger of muzzling oneself in response to these fears, of undercutting one’s own project, of being frozen by that fear, is all too strong, and opens one to even more fears. In writing about the pleasures of the razor’s edge, one must walk it, and thereby risk solomonizing oneself. I fear the nihilistic “emotional vacuity”of the internet novel—as so devastatingly critiqued by Brandon Taylor—almost as much as the emotional glut of career confessionals, the poor souls who bring home the bacon by selling their trauma piecemeal, flesh for flesh. This fear manifests as a false dichotomy: That one can only either be too earnest (tender) or not earnest enough (problematic). Then there are the TERFS, the transphobes, the whorephobes, and the misogynists. My time will come, I suppose.
Whether these anxieties are a feature of writing at the present moment, a symptom of the unrealized artist (“Writers, feeling guilty for not doing real work,” wrote Elif Batuman in 2006, “turn in shame to the notion of writing as “craft.”), or something else entirely, they’re on my mind enough that I’ve decided it’s finally time to kick off my series on cringe. Taking as its jumping-off point the embarrassment of kink, I’m hoping to delve deeper into affect/theory, humiliation, orgasm, and why some stuff just doesn’t translate to the page. More on that next time.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
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My dressy version of the X elevator pitch. The quick and dirty one might be: Femdom nightmare exposes fake top.
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