Image by Prachya Singhto from Pixabay
Breathe...
Moist, ripe, heavy, laced with the scents of jasmine, garlic, diesel
fuel, the tropical air was strange but welcome after the stale
atmosphere of the airplane cabin. Kate O’Neill stepped off the jet
way and filled her lungs gratefully. Even in business class, the
twenty hour flight had been grueling. Kate ran her fingers through
her tangled auburn curls and tried to smooth the wrinkles from her
practical cotton skirt as she joined the crowds queuing at
Immigration.
She
felt a bit dazed. Only a month ago, she had answered the
advertisement in the Boston Globe, and now here she was, half a world
away, surrounded by foreign faces, buoyed by the musical rise and
fall of Thai and a half-dozen other Asian languages.
Thus
begins my first novel, Raw Silk – with a re-creation of my
own sensory impressions from the first time I got off a plane in
Bangkok. Actually, back then, in the nineteen eighties, there were no
jet ways. I recall clambering down the steel steps and walking along
the tarmac to the terminal, assaulted by the muggy heat even at
eleven at night, breathing air that smelled as though I'd landed on
another planet.
Like
Kate, I'd come to Asia for a new job. I was easily as bewildered and
overwhelmed as she by the vagaries of an alien culture. I used my own
recollections to bring verisimilitude to Kate's experiences. But is
Raw Silk autobiographical?
Yes,
and no.
Threads
of truth weave through the narrative fabric. The book could be viewed
as a fictionalization of my own sexual explorations, especially my
initiation into dominance and submission. I borrowed scenes, sexual
activities, character traits, even specific items of dialogue from my
interactions with my real world master. When he read the novel, he
definitely picked up on at least some of my references.
Probably
he would have been annoyed at my disclosures, if flattery hadn't won
him over. After all, how many men have lovers who immortalize them in
best selling (well... sort of) erotic novels? And anyway, my shy,
nerdy, sensitive master is barely recognizable in the arrogant,
crude, savagely sexy hero Gregory Marshall.
Unless
you stop and listen to what the character says...
I'm
a writer. That means I'm a professional liar. I take bits and pieces
of reality and spin them into fantasy. My fiction abounds in people,
situations, and settings drawn from my life and history. Although I
might start with the truth, though, I leaven the facts with
substantial portions of imagination. And I mix things up –
locations, personality traits, sexual adventures – until I really
don't need to worry much about the original subjects' complaints
about my revelations.
Certainly
I don't want to antagonize anyone from my past. However, the primary
reason for embroidering upon the truth is simply that real life is
rarely as interesting as fiction. I could write about that totally
arousing visit to the Renaissance Faire – but in fact I didn't
really end up with the bawdy wench and her swain, much as I would
have liked to. That solo cross-country rail trip could have
involved a quickie in the top bunk – but alas, things never
progressed beyond flirting.
Many
of my stories begin with actual experiences or relationships, and
then spin off into the realm of fantasy when I start to ask “what
if”. What if my master and I lived together? (We never have.) What
if my mid-western boyfriend in grad school had been interested in
BDSM? What if I found a Victorian diary detailing a society woman's
sexual adventures? What if I'd met my master after decades of being
married to someone else?
In
fact, I've only written two or three stories that closely track real
events, and even then, I manipulated the outcomes. And I find that as
I've gained more writing experience, my tales have grown further
from their autobiographical roots. Still, I do return again and again
to a few primal scenes, the ones that touched me most deeply, telling
the story from different perspectives, reliving the intensity through
my characters.
I
sometimes wonder whether readers can tell. Do the scenes closer to
the “truth” somehow feel more real? Or am I as skilled a liar as
I believe?
Let's
try a quiz. (Of course this will only work for people who are
somewhat familiar with my books...) Which of the following scenes
from Raw Silk is mostly closely based on real life?
-
The infamous sex with chillies scene;
-
The scene is which Kate masturbates with the knob from the end of her hotel bed;
-
The scene in which Kate has sex on stage with a Thai go-go dancer;
-
The scene in which Somtow pleasures Kate with a ripe mango;
-
The scene in which Gregory sodomizes Kate for the first time.
Am
I going to give you the answer? As I consider the list, I'm not sure
I can. I know which of the items above I intended as the right
selection, but when I review the others in my mind, I realize each
one has a core of truth, even if I modified the background details.
In
fact, the more I write, the harder I find it to distinguish between
things that “really” happened and things that occurred only in my
fiction. I know this may seem bizarre, but my most exotic sexual
adventures took place decades ago. Looking back now, I find they have
a dreamlike quality – not very different from the way I remember my
stories. The imaginary settings in my novels feel as tangible and
detailed as the places I've actually been – perhaps more so,
because I had to observe them more closely in order to describe them
for my readers.
At
this point, truth and lies intertwine so intimately in my fiction
that even I can't distinguish them. And I suppose that might be
viewed as dangerous, to some.
But
I've always lived my life more in my head than in my body. The
products of my imagination have at least as much substance for me as
the so-called real world. Dangerous or not, there's nothing I can do.
