by Lara Lillibridge
Steph Auteri is a New Jersey-based writer and editor who has written about women’s health and sexuality for over 16 years. Her memoir, A Dirty Word: How A Sex Writer Reclaimed Her Sexuality, details her attempt to cure her perceived sexual dysfunction through becoming a sex writer. Laden with research and resources, this memoir both explores Auteri’s struggle and educates the reader about female sexuality and how it is treated in our culture.
Auteri is also an editor for Simplemost, the Managing Editor of Good in Bed, and a blogger for both Book Riot and the Center for Sex Education. She’s also a mother of a toddler, a cat lady, a book nerd, and a certified yoga instructor. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram, check out her Facebook author page, and don’t miss her delightful Tiny Letter called Thunder Thighs.
LL: I love your cover. Did you have any input into the design?
S.A: Luckily in my contract I was able to have a little input on that. The cover wound up very close to what I was thinking.
LL: Your closeness with your mother was apparent from the dedication and throughout in little things, like how much pride she took in your work. Your book starts in young adulthood, so I’m curious about your childhood and how and if your mother talked to you about sex.
SA: I grew up sort of clueless around sexuality. We didn’t talk directly about sex together until I was nineteen. The only message I consistently received was “you don’t have sex until marriage.” So I just assumed I wasn’t going to have sex until marriage. Most people don’t hear that message and think, “that’s that” but I was a goody-goody growing up, and I followed the rules, and expected to follow that rule as well.
Sex embarrasses my mom to talk about but she did a good job of raising me to be a good human. Seeing her as my mother is what made me want to be a mother because she was so awesome at it!
LL: You seemed to have a great deal of insight as to your motivations when you were younger. How much of that were you aware of at the time, and how much was retroactive?
SA: I don’t know if it comes from being an introvert, but I was always more internal. I was always pretty self-aware, and then when I started therapy in my late teens that made me even more self-aware, so I was always prepared to self-diagnose myself.
LL: I grew up thinking everyone in high school was having sex, yet in prepping for this interview I learned that the majority of teens, close to 60%, do remain virgins until after high school. Were you and your friends all on the same page? Did you feel supported in your decision to remain a virgin by your friends? Ridiculed?
SA: I never got the sense that my friends were having sex, though I knew they were making out. I didn’t have my first kiss until I was seventeen, and I felt that I was super late in that but I felt that we were all sort of on the same page—were all raised with the same values.
LL: I love the description, “made me feel all squicky,” and I thought it was cool that your publisher let that fly.
SA: There were some words that they were like, “uh, I don’t know about this word,” and I was like, ‘well, that’s pretty much exactly how it felt.’
LL: I thought squicky was perfect!
LL: Another quote I related to in your book was, “I also learned that the virgin/whore complex is still alive and well and is only amplified when you write about sex for a living.” I’ve experienced this some myself as a former erotica writer. Have you moved beyond that squicky response because you are seen as more of a professional now?
SA: When it comes to people who are closer to me, who have known me for years and years, the response is more, “Oh congratulations on your book, though I have to admit that reading about it made me feel super awkward because I’ve known you forever and I’d like to think you have no ‘doin’ it parts’ because you’re like a sister to me.” But when I meet new people I never know what the response is going to be. I’m very cautious when I’m trying to explain what my book is about, because I don’t want to deal with that whole “oh, you’re a sex writer, you must be some kinky nymphomaniac.”
I used to do Toastmasters to work on public speaking, and there was this guy there who knew I was a sex writer, but not exactly what that meant, so he just assumed that I was a laid back chick that he could talk about anything with…like taking clients out to the strip club. When I explained what my book was actually about I watched his face fall when he realized, “oh, you’re that you’re that kind of a sex writer.” Then he went crazy trying to apologize to me. When people think “sex writer” they think you’re someone with no boundaries about sex. That’s still something I get around the book, around my writing in general.
“When people think ‘sex writer’ they think you’re someone with no boundaries about sex. That’s still something I get around the book, around my writing in general.” – Steph Auteri
LL: The other side of that, which you touched on at the end of your book, was shown in comment by the friend who asked you “Is this a book your daughter is going to be embarrassed by?” I’ve gotten some of this in regards to my own memoir, and I feel as if it’s the female side of the squicky—a judgy response.
SA: I get that most often from my own mom! I tell her this is exactly why I’m writing this book. It’s called A Dirty Word because we treat sex like a dirty word. I want my daughter more than anyone else to be able to learn from my experiences. No one would ask a father that. It’s so insulting to ask me that. My husband finally read my book the other week—he’s read many of the stories in one form or another—but after reading specifically the chapters about my fears for my daughter he suggested we hand this book over to her. I can’t remember the age he suggested, but I remember thinking ‘that might be a little too soon,’ but then I’m bringing my own cultural biases with me. I want her to be able to learn from this book, but there’s this culture we live in that teaches us to be embarrassed to know these things about people we’re close to. There are definitely pieces of the book that are TMI for my daughter, but on the other hand the lessons in the book are exactly what I want to be giving her, though she might feel squicky reading it.
LL: I found your book to be very empowering—it’s not just sex positive, but more holistic. The question “am I normal?” seems to be the core of your book, both for the writer and the reader. But there’s so much about feminism and strength as a woman as well. To me, you really captured the paralysis of “politeness conditioning” that I was definitely raised with, and that you don’t want your daughter to adhere to.
SA: Especially lately, I feel like it’s so inevitable no matter what I do. It feels like you’re one tiny person pushing back against all of history.
LL: Yes! But you have done this thing, you’ve created this physical object that will withstand time and will reach so many more people than just one family.
SA: And it still feels futile.
LL: Your book is very well researched. How much of that was planned for this book, and how much was that you had already done all this research and decided to pull it into a book?
SA: It was both. When I started writing this book, this wasn’t the book I set out to write, I was going to write a traditional memoir about my own experience with libido and painful sex. My proposal was out on submission with my first agent and I got a lot of great feedback that it was bifurcated—that it was trying to be a memoir, but I was also trying to give lessons on what I’d learned from my terrible experience. I put it away in a drawer and thought it would never see the light of day again.
I had been doing some work with sexuality professionals helping them with ebooks, social media, and articles. I landed this job as senior writer and editor for AASECT (American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists) and as I interviewed them for long form articles, learning more and more about public health and the field of sexuality, I got used to digging into the research as well. That work led me to what my book has become now. A lot of the research in the book came up as I was working with AASECT and after, as I saw which topics I really needed to cover in the book—some would be purely personal, some needed further research later on in the process.
LL: There’s been some media attention lately about women refusing to discuss how mothering impacts their work, yet I feel as if your mothering is in fact intrinsic to your work—a strength of it. To me writing and being a mother are very closely tied, but as you said, no one will ask a father ‘how will this affect your children.’ In a way I think writing from a woman’s perspective is a very powerful thing, whether or not it’s viewed that way. Do you have any other thoughts on this?
SA: I was chatting with Krystal Sital about this at HippoCamp. Yes, no one asks men these questions, but by the same point, being a mother and being a writer are so intertwined in my life—its’ just the way it is. I’ve been reading the book Fed Up by Gemma Hartley about emotional labor, about having to be the cruise director for your life and the life of your entire family. That’s oversimplifying it, but that’s the role that I’ve fallen into. I can’t talk about my writing process without also talking about motherhood. Having my daughter has influenced what I write about—my focus within that niche has shifted dramatically. She has also influenced how quickly or slowly I’m able to write, when I’m able to write—it would be disingenuous not to talk about it. Women are supposed to shut up about the challenges we face, having to juggle all this. Being that I’m all about not shutting up about the things we aren’t supposed to talk about, I have to talk about it.
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Steph Auteri’s A Dirty Word hits shelves Oct. 8, 2018. Learn more about her (and sign up for her TinyLetter) at her website.
Lara Lillibridge is the author of Mama, Mama, Only Mama (Skyhorse, 2019) and Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home (Skyhorse, 2018). She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from West Virginia Wesleyan College and won Slippery Elm Literary Journal’s Prose Contest and The American Literary Review’s Contest in Nonfiction.
