Book Nook: Sex, A Love Story

 Echoing the uncertainty that rocked millennials and zoomers in 2020, Sex, A Love Story compellingly explores the angst of teen lovers sandwiched between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in the early 1960s. This powerful, coming-of-age tale looks at ways in which sex and identity can become inextricably intertwined, simultaneously affirming one’s adulthood and yet somehow still defying it.  

Sex, in the hands of teenagers, can simultaneously define and destroy a still-maturing identity. In Sex, A Love Story, author Jerome Gold explores the complex role of sex in the lives of two high school seniors who use physical intimacy as a way of affirming their adulthood and establishing their individuality.

 

Set in Fullerton (Orange County), California, Sex, A Love Story takes place at the end of the Eisenhower era and the beginning of the Kennedy administration. The coming-of-age novel follows Bob and Jen, children of parents who entered the middle class after WWII. Life, for these kids, has not reached the level of affluence the professional class knows, and they are left to feel insecure about their futures. Will they find work? Go to college? Or enter the military?

 

At first a powerful antidote to their frustration and normal teen angst, sex between Jen and Bob takes on a life of its own and becomes a complex entity in the book’s narrative. Jen sees herself as a sexual being — even more so than Bob sees her — an undercurrent that’s a nod to the culture in the 1960s.

Much of the sex in the book is erotic, although some parts read more clinically. If, for these kids, sex is at first a way of exploring the adult world, later it becomes a way to defy it.

 

While sex with Jen and his growing love for her are immeasurably important to Bob, so is his desire to write and travel, “to learn how the world works.” Jen and that imagined life become rivals, nudging Bob toward an ultimatum: choose his dream or his love for Jen, who grows into a much more complex character as their journey unfolds, and certainly a more tragic one.

I had a chance to interview the author to learn more.

Why did you write Sex, A Love Story?

I’ve always been interested in the way things happen. “Things,” meaning in human life, especially in the emotional life of our species. And, recognizing that I can’t write about everything, I try to write about things that I, and hopefully readers, consider important. I’ve written novels and stories concerned with war and poverty and race relations. But I’d never written about sex, even though sex is certainly important. 

As it happened, I didn’t plan to write a book about sex or love, but one night 

I received a phone call from a woman I had known when she and I were very young. She had had a bout with cancer and had been frightened by it and hoped to establish, or re-establish, a relationship with me as someone who had known her when she was “full of myself.” She remembered me in a way she needed to remember (I think), not as I remembered myself. 

I began making notes about our talks and emails in my journal. Soon I found myself making things up, and what I was making up had little or nothing to do with my old friend. I tried to go back to simple journal entries about who said what and what it might mean, but couldn’t. Something in me insisted on inventing other people, sometimes inspired by people I had known, but sometimes having nothing in common with anyone I had known. 

This is how fiction happens, at least with me. It almost always begins with something that is not fiction, then, within a few pages, begins to assert itself as something more than, or at least other than, fact.

A longer answer than what you bargained for, I’ll bet. 

A shorter answer: I wrote the book because it came to me, and because sex and love and the way one may grow out of the other interested me and I wanted to explore it as a subject. My primary way of exploring something is through stories, those I tell and those other writers tell.

Why is it important to read books set in different points in history?

The books you refer to I take to be historical novels, biographies of people who lived in other times, or historical accounts of things that occurred in other times.

I think it’s important to understand, or try to understand history because it sheds light on our own time. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it allows us to recognize ourselves in other people, in other times. The people caught up in historical circumstances similar to ours may show us what we might do in our own era. Or they may provide a cautionary tale about what not to do. 

Once when I was in our war in Viet Nam, my unit was under attack. Because I had read Bernard Fall’s book, Street Without Joy, I was able to figure out what the enemy had in mind when they attacked (based on similar attacks they had made against the French as recounted in Fall’s book) and we were able to adjust our response to my perception that the enemy wasn’t interested in overwhelming us, but rather wanted to attack a larger unit that would be sent to reinforce us. So instead of trying to evacuate our position, which could have been disastrous, we dug in and battled it out. (Fortunately I was in a unit where even a lowly enlisted man was listened to). 

Another time, because I had read a couple of social histories, including anecdotes, I was able, by following the line of reasoning presented in that book, to prevent a young man from killing himself.

Because histories, by definition, are at a remove from our own time, they can present unpleasant situations as less threatening than if they were shown to happen in our own time. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. People don’t make decisions as if they lived in isolation from other people. Histories, historical novels, biographies, all show their “characters” in the context of what is going on around them, of what influences they are under, of what they know at the time they must decide what to do. 

How did you choose the title and focus of the book?

Just as I didn’t plan to write the book, I didn’t plan the direction the book would take. When I was making notes to clarify my thinking, a scene would occur to me and I would write it out. Or I would remember something somebody had told me and I would write it down. Or after writing down a scene I would recall how I felt or what somebody else told me he or she felt in a similar situation, and I would put that down. Once I got down to where I was beginning to understand who my major characters where and what they were feeling, I begin to perceive the direction they would go. It wasn’t as though I were inventing a story; rather, I was discovering the story. 

After the first draft, I wrote all the succeeding drafts with the idea of making the story better—sharper, clearer usually, but sometimes intentionally more vague. The idea was to encourage the reader to feel what my characters were feeling—to experience what they were experiencing, but from a remove. I wanted the reader to care for my characters, about what happens to them, even though the characters are flawed.

I chose the title because that was what the book was about—the relationship between sex and love (though, as we know, love does not always follow from sex). Also, it’s a catchy title. A different title I was thinking about was “Intimacy.” And, of course, the book is about intimacy. But I thought that “Intimacy” sound more like a how-to manual than a novel.

What response would you have to people who might be a little leery of reading the book due to its title?

I’d say, “Don’t be afraid. It’s only a book. It won’t hurt you. Reading it will enable you to empathize with the characters; you don’t have to be the characters. The book makes no recommendations. You’re not required to do anything after reading it.”

 

Jerome Gold is the author of 16 books, including Children in Prison: Six Profiles Before, During and After Incarceration; In the Spider’s Web; and Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility.

 

Mr. Gold received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington. He did fieldwork in Montana and American Samoa. He chose not to pursue a career in academia, but instead worked as a rehabilitation counselor in a prison for children in Washington State.