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“Quentin Tarantino meets HBO’s Girls.” Kirkus Review’s thumbnail description of Jessica Anya Blau’s new high-energy, crazy-fun novel, The Wonder Bread Summer, out today from Harper, struck me as perfect. (I had been thinking Pineapple Express myself, only set in the 80s and for women.) Now Nick Hornby has signed up to lead the fan club in this review in The Believer. So in honor of her publication this week, I’m turning the tables on the lady behind the Six Question Sex Interview, whom I am also proud to claim as friend, neighbor, muse and skin care advisor.
Why do you like to talk about sex so much?
Well, I didn’t realize that I like to talk to about sex so much. I like talking to people. I’m interested in people. And sex is a lot of who they are. So I’m interested in that.
Yes, but you seem to turn the subject to, say, labia, much more frequently than other people I know.
No, I don’t! Do I? But, really, aren’t labia way more interesting than, say, the water commissioner? Or . . .people’s kids’ lacrosse tournaments?
Okay, if you’re not obsessed, then why the Six Question Sex Interview? You could be asking people about their protagonists and their metaphors and their literary influences but instead you’re asking them about their orgasms!
Well that wasn’t deliberate. What happened was I was interviewing the novelist James Magruder who wrote an hilarious novel about growing up in the 70s as a gay, horny, kid. And —
Sugarless! I just bought my third copy! I keep loaning it to people who don’t give it back.
Right, it’s a great, funny book. And when I was interviewing Jim the subject kept turning to sex and somehow it worked its way to a story he told me about being a young, gay, man and having some guy stick a candle up his ass —
Because Jim Magruder is that rare person who likes to talk about sex even more than you do. He’s told stories like that candlestick one in front of my kids at the dinner table!
Haha! Okay, yes, so he’s willing to say anything anywhere. And I’m always willing to talk about other people’s sex lives. I don’t talk about my own sex life because I’m sort of shy about my personal life, and I have two kids. Anyway, I finished the interview with him and I titled it Six Question Sex Interview with James Magruder. The editors loved it and have kept it as a regular thing on The Nervous Breakdown ever since.
The Wonder Bread Summer begins, literally, with a large, exposed penis. I’m sure most readers will wonder, as they did with the ickier sex moments in your previous works, if there is an autobiographical basis for that. Did that, or anything like that, ever happen to you? How have you handled unwanted or scary male attention in your own life?
The opening scene happened in some version to me. I was working at a little boutique on the Oakland/Berkeley border and as the summer progressed, I eventually realized that the boutique was a front for cocaine dealing. The owner of the shop seemed like a nice, cool guy. He dressed exquisitely and he wore a beeper. At some point in the summer he started pulling out his dick. No one was ever in the store, so he’d just unzip his slacks and whip it out.
It was sort of terrifying and I was only 20 and wasn’t sure how to respond. He liked to talk about his dick while he was holding it out and since I wasn’t sure how to act I did stupid things like laugh and say, “Oh, you should put that away because customers might come in.” You know, silly things like that. I found that from puberty on, there was a continuous stream of attention like that that I never quite knew how to handle.
It was a different time. We weren’t raised with the “unwanted touch,” lessons that my kids have had. And it was rare to report that kind of stuff. I think that most women of my generation and all the generations above mine dealt with this stuff for a number of years. You deal with it until you become wise enough to look someone in the eye and reduce their power, their power over you.
So you’ve pretty much always been able to neutralize the ray guns?
Well, no, I was always fumbling and terrified and I would laugh or make a joke or something. I mean, there was the teacher in high school who pushed his hard-on into my ass before class started and whispered in my ear, “I can’t wait until you’re eighteen, Blau.” I rushed away and never came to class early. And there was the teacher in college who showed up in my room when I was in bed sick and lunged at me on the bed and I pushed him off and said something about having bronchitis or being contagious, oh and something about him being married and he said, “My wife doesn’t mind!”
There were the numerous penises that came out — a housemate’s brother’s, for example, while talking to him alone in a room, he just whipped it out. I remember that it was extraordinarily pink. And he was a great looking guy, someone I probably would have hooked up with until that moment. When he pulled his dick out, I just laughed nervously and then lied about having a boyfriend.
My god, there was the guy who delivered pizza to my friend’s house when her parents were out of town when I was only 13. He was 24 or 25. He sat next to me on the couch and whispered in my ear all night and I was terrified but transfixed. He used words I’d never even heard up to that moment. Eventually I did figure out how to neutralize these unwanted encounters. The people who do these kinds of things choose well, they don’t chose people who are onto them. And after experiencing and studying people for so long, you can figure out who’s who pretty quickly.
I can see how those experiences played out in the development of Allie, who has a sexually abusive boss and an emotionally abusive boyfriend. But, you also give her one off-the-charts amazing sexual experience.
Well, yes, because great sex is great, right? She has sex with Billy Idol and it is purely joyous sex. And he doesn’t force it on her, he asks her. And, of course, she says yes. Wouldn’t you? I think sex can be incredible with anyone who is genuinely interested in you as a complete person. Great sex is one of the biggest joys on earth. I mean, don’t you feel better and happier when you’re having sex? It’s a wonderful way not to think, a way to eliminate neurosis, and self-centeredness, eliminate the me me me me me from your consciousness. It’s great to be out of yourself.
YES! But does great sex have to be with a rock star? Doesn’t great sex make us all rock stars?
Absolutely! And when you’re in love, the person you’re in love with is like a rock star. In the book, Allie has great sex with her boyfriend before he dumps her. But that sex is in the past–it happened before the start of the book, she only remembers back to it. Maybe the best thing about sex is that it is all equal. There’s nothing about being a rock star and going on world tour that makes you any better when it comes to sex. What’s wonderful about Billy Idol and Allie is that they both see the experience for what it is. She has no illusions of running off and marrying him and he has no illusions of being worshiped. Yes, she’s star struck at first, and even during the event, but each of them are coming to it in a totally genuine and honest way.
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