Yes, My Female Characters Have Sex

Yes, my female characters have sex.*

*Good sex. And I no longer care if that bothers some people.

By Amy Mason Doan

My novel SUMMER HOURS was five months from publication when the “S word” first came up. It was on GoodReads, where an advance reader had put the book on a list: “Character You Most Want to Sleep With.”

I was flattered, and curious. Which character? The older, forbidden lover that my main character, Becc, secretly trysts with during her summer home from college? Becc herself—inexperienced, but sensual, direct, and eager to learn what she’s been missing all these years? Or Eric, the troubled old friend her age who’s carrying a torch for her? (He’s that goofy-on-the-surface, platonic buddy from school who has to exit your life for a few years before you can see him clearly.) The emotional and physical connection between him and Becc is so strong that it’s the throughline of the entire book, which follows the characters into middle age.

I had fun musing over the possibilities. But the “Character You Most Want to Sleep With” list also worried me a little. I try to avoid reviews, but I frequently lapse. And as I pored over them that day, I noticed that more than one early reader had called SUMMER HOURS “Sexy.”

I was more comfortable with adjectives like “emotional” and “sensitive” and “heart-tugging.” The novel is considered “book club fiction” or “upmarket commercial,” depending on who in the publishing business I ask. If everyone noticed the sex, would my novel be taken seriously?

I’d never thought of my writing as especially risqué. Sure, I’d winced when my mom texted me that she was on page 80 of my first novel, THE SUMMER LIST. I knew that my main character Laura would soon be entangled in the front seat of a car with her long-lost teenage boyfriend (clothes on, end-of-the-date, hoping they don’t get busted—exactly like when they were teenagers decades before). But I hadn’t thought of my books as particularly sex-forward until the GoodReads list day. It got me thinking about the sex scenes in both of my novels.

One of my favorite authors, Anne Tyler, famously said this:

“I would never be in bed with my characters. I try to show them respect.”

Tyler’s novels are flawless examinations of family and inner lives, and I can’t imagine sex scenes in them. 

But I can’t imagine my own stories without them. In both THE SUMMER LIST and SUMMER HOURS, dueling guilt and joy over female sexuality drives much of the tension. In THE SUMMER LIST, Laura continually wrestles with the conflict between other people’s judgment and her sensuality. In SUMMER HOURS, my feminist answer to The Graduate, Becc is convinced that she’ll lose her scholarship, and her friends, if everyone finds out that she’s been sleeping with the older “Mr. Robinson” figure. To me, these stories would feel incomplete if the screen faded to black right as my characters’ clothes came off (or, as in that one nighttime car scene in THE SUMMER LIST, as Laura and J.B. work around the delicious obstruction of their clothes). 

Since my books pivot between past and present, I try to show how my characters have changed over the years, and how they haven’t. My middle-aged female characters still feel just as intensely as they did when they were teenagers. They grapple with their childhood idealism, they make mistakes, they confront their regrets—and they still seek out closeness and passion. They’re still desirable, and they desire.

So I follow them into the bedroom. I also follow them: 

Onto a sailboat

Into a roller-rink Lost & Found closet

Onto a tree-covered field on Catalina island

Into a lighthouse

Underwater (this doesn’t go so well since, as the younger Becc, ever the attentive student, notes, “sex underwater is challenging on a number of levels.”)

It’s always been important to me to show that my female characters seek out, and often experience, satisfying sex. Maybe what the GoodReads list maker found notable about my book isn’t just that there’s sex on the page. It’s good female sex on the page.

I stopped worrying about it. Busy with pre-publication (and the hundred other anxieties that come with it), I hadn’t given my book’s heat level a thought for months.

Then, two weeks ago, I posted a digital flyer in my hometown Facebook page. It was a simple image of the SUMMER HOURS cover, with my name, a review quote, and the date of an upcoming reading. I got dozens of warm, encouraging responses, “Likes,” “Loves,” and RSVPS.

And this, from someone I didn’t know named “Dwight”:

“What kind of book is this? Im guessing lust sexual immorality romance junk…the usual carnal hedonistic trash that promotes sin.”

He posted the same message on my author pages. Quick research showed that “Dwight” almost certainly had not read my books, and that he frequently posted similar messages, especially about books by women. I muted him, blocked him, and alerted my team, and haven’t heard anything since.

I told a trusted writer friend and critique partner at coffee a few days ago about my troll, and how, much to my irritation, he’d hit a nerve. I asked her, sheepishly, if any of the sex scenes in my books felt problematic. 

“The sex doesn’t feel gratuitous, does it?”

“No,” she said firmly. “It feels real.”

“Thanks.”

We agreed that the post was all more the reason to write directly, honestly, and without fear. We sipped our cold brews in silence for a minute. Then she said, “Wait a sec…”, and reached for her Kindle. I braced for her to read one of my sultrier scenes aloud in her full ex-theater-major “grab ‘em in the last row” voice—for the enjoyment of the dad and toddler sharing a blueberry muffin at the table across the cafe. 

But instead she read a quote from Diana Gabaldon’s wonderful 2012 book “I Give You My Body”:

“A good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids.” 

I agree. And I’m not going to change anything. 

 —

Amy Mason Doan lives in Portland, Oregon. She grew up in California, but as a girl she visited the Oregon Shakespeare Fest with her grandparents every year, and she now considers both states home.

As a writer for publications including The Oregonian, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired and Forbes, Amy has interviewed everyone from beer-brewing monks to nanotechnologists. Amy has an M.A. in Journalism from Stanford University and a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley.

She is the author of THE SUMMER LIST and SUMMER HOURS, published by Graydon House/HarperCollins.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/AmyLDoan

Find out more about her on her website https://amymasondoan.com/

SUMMER HOURS, Amy Mason Doan

Commencement meets The Graduate in this sparkling novel about a secret affair, the summer it all unravels, and the reunion a decade later that will be one woman’s happy ending or her biggest mistake.

Becc was the good girl. A dedicated student. Aspiring reporter. Always where she was supposed to be. Until a secret affair with the charming Cal one summer in college cost her everything she held dear: her journalism dreams; her relationship with her best friend, Eric; and her carefully imagined future.

Now, Becc’s past is back front and center as she travels up the scenic California coast to a wedding—with a man she hasn’t seen in a decade. As each mile flies by, Becc can’t help but feel the thrilling push and pull of memories, from infinite nights at beach bonfires and lavish boat parties to secret movie sessions. But the man beside her is not so eager to re-create history. And as the events of that heartbreaking summer come into view, Becc must decide if those dazzling hours they once shared are worth fighting for or if they’re lost forever.

Set in the mid ’90s and 2008, Amy Mason Doan’s Summer Hours is a warmly told novel about the idealism of youth, the seductive power of nostalgia and what happens when you realize you haven’t become the person you’d always promised to be.

“Engaging and nostalgic. Doan’s writing sweeps you away to the high-speed, sun-soaked backdrop of nineties California.” —Helen Hoang, author of The Kiss Quotient

“A beautifully crafted story of love, ambition, and friendship.” —Jamie Brenner, bestselling author of The Forever Summer and Drawing Home

BUY THE BOOK HERE

     

 

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