Karen Connelly's Blog - Posts Tagged "punishment"
Why I Wrote The Change Room
Dear Readers,
I've been fascinated to read the reviews here, not just of The Change Room, but of all my work. Thank you. I am just coming to the Goodreads site now--I've looked in now and again, but have never thought to engage at all with readers, mostly because I am so busy. But a reader recently asked me to 'sign up' so that I would have more of a profile right on the site.
Why DID I write The Change Room, which is about a middle-class married het-seeming woman who falls in lust with another woman and begins a passionate affair?
Because I wanted to think and write honestly about sex and transgression. I wanted to write and think about marriage, housework, taking care of children, working, AND still being a sexual being. So much of what I read in literary fiction ignores sex almost altogether, or contains really bad sex, or contains hot sex that is all about dysfunction and woundedness.
I wanted to portray two different women, too--one who has taken a much more 'normal' path into life and another who has chosen a less conventional way to be. And I wanted to resist punishment as a moral force. Punishment, when it comes to sex, has been our go-to response as humans for way too long. As Eliza is one of the only characters in serious literary fiction who is not punished for her adultery (either with death or with the death of her kids) so Shar is one of the only sex worker characters in literary fiction who is healthy, despite any wounds she might have from the past. Neither of these women is perfect, as Andrew, Eliza's husband, is not perfect either. (Uh . . . like most people.) But they are all struggling toward connection. They love. They are alive in the world and in their own experience. But, boy, have people ever taken me to task for writing this novel!!
The Change Room, in part, is about sex without punishment. No surprise, perhaps, that I have been punished for writing the book, in various ways, both professional and personal. A woman has to be punished! I wrote the damn thing, so it's true, it's all my fault. Yet I didn't expect that to happen because I had so much fun writing it--my pleasure and delight prevented me from seeing how threatening it remains, even now, in 2017, for a woman to be honest sexually on the page. Men can write about women's sexuality and be lauded for it. I'll be doing a panel at the Vancouver Writer's Festival in October, 2017 with just such a man, Tom Perotta, presenting his novel, Mrs Fletcher, partly about a woman with a porn addiction. Of course it has to be an addiction, a pathology--what is sick sells better. But I cannot even get The Change Room published in the U.S. No U.S. publisher will touch it. Who would read it? they ask. Who indeed? When women write about sex, especially explicit sex, especially transgressive explicit sex, there is still a price to pay.
Yet I am still glad I wrote the novel. It gave me enormous pleasure because it contains enormous pleasure, both sexual and literary. And it continues my long writerly and simply human exploration of the body. All my books are about how we live in, love through, suffer, and sometimes, through death, transcend our bodies. My last novel, The Lizard Cage, explored the body punished; The Change Room explores the body pleasured. But at this moment our culture does not love a woman's body, pleasured and fulfilled. It prefers her dead (see all the popular cable and Netflix series involving dead or violated women) or unhappy.
Here is Shelagh Roger's interview with me on CBC's The Next Chapter, where we speak further about the need to let go of punishment when it comes to women, men and sex.
http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/the-ne...
Enjoy (ha!) and thank you for reading. Thank you SO MUCH for reading, whatever it is, and whatever your reaction to the books are. We need each other, readers, writers, humans thinking and feeling in the world.
All my best,
KC
The Change Room
The Lizard Cage
Come Cold River
I've been fascinated to read the reviews here, not just of The Change Room, but of all my work. Thank you. I am just coming to the Goodreads site now--I've looked in now and again, but have never thought to engage at all with readers, mostly because I am so busy. But a reader recently asked me to 'sign up' so that I would have more of a profile right on the site.
Why DID I write The Change Room, which is about a middle-class married het-seeming woman who falls in lust with another woman and begins a passionate affair?
Because I wanted to think and write honestly about sex and transgression. I wanted to write and think about marriage, housework, taking care of children, working, AND still being a sexual being. So much of what I read in literary fiction ignores sex almost altogether, or contains really bad sex, or contains hot sex that is all about dysfunction and woundedness.
I wanted to portray two different women, too--one who has taken a much more 'normal' path into life and another who has chosen a less conventional way to be. And I wanted to resist punishment as a moral force. Punishment, when it comes to sex, has been our go-to response as humans for way too long. As Eliza is one of the only characters in serious literary fiction who is not punished for her adultery (either with death or with the death of her kids) so Shar is one of the only sex worker characters in literary fiction who is healthy, despite any wounds she might have from the past. Neither of these women is perfect, as Andrew, Eliza's husband, is not perfect either. (Uh . . . like most people.) But they are all struggling toward connection. They love. They are alive in the world and in their own experience. But, boy, have people ever taken me to task for writing this novel!!
The Change Room, in part, is about sex without punishment. No surprise, perhaps, that I have been punished for writing the book, in various ways, both professional and personal. A woman has to be punished! I wrote the damn thing, so it's true, it's all my fault. Yet I didn't expect that to happen because I had so much fun writing it--my pleasure and delight prevented me from seeing how threatening it remains, even now, in 2017, for a woman to be honest sexually on the page. Men can write about women's sexuality and be lauded for it. I'll be doing a panel at the Vancouver Writer's Festival in October, 2017 with just such a man, Tom Perotta, presenting his novel, Mrs Fletcher, partly about a woman with a porn addiction. Of course it has to be an addiction, a pathology--what is sick sells better. But I cannot even get The Change Room published in the U.S. No U.S. publisher will touch it. Who would read it? they ask. Who indeed? When women write about sex, especially explicit sex, especially transgressive explicit sex, there is still a price to pay.
Yet I am still glad I wrote the novel. It gave me enormous pleasure because it contains enormous pleasure, both sexual and literary. And it continues my long writerly and simply human exploration of the body. All my books are about how we live in, love through, suffer, and sometimes, through death, transcend our bodies. My last novel, The Lizard Cage, explored the body punished; The Change Room explores the body pleasured. But at this moment our culture does not love a woman's body, pleasured and fulfilled. It prefers her dead (see all the popular cable and Netflix series involving dead or violated women) or unhappy.
Here is Shelagh Roger's interview with me on CBC's The Next Chapter, where we speak further about the need to let go of punishment when it comes to women, men and sex.
http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/the-ne...
Enjoy (ha!) and thank you for reading. Thank you SO MUCH for reading, whatever it is, and whatever your reaction to the books are. We need each other, readers, writers, humans thinking and feeling in the world.
All my best,
KC
The Change Room
The Lizard Cage
Come Cold River
