"Should I Warn My Family About the Sex Scenes in My Book?"

It's a little late to be asking.

Original column: Emily Gould, NY Magazine, June 12 2024.

My take: After many years of trying, the letter-writer is about to publish a book of essays—hurray! Her proud mother is bragging all over the extended family—thanks, Mom!

But there’s a problem: The essays include “many anecdotes relating to casual sex, moderate drug use, and just existing as a sexual being in general.” So now the LW is anxious because “my grandmother will read about me getting railed,” not to mention relatives who “are culturally conservative, all married by, like, 22 to the first man they ever dated.”

So what should she do? Should she warn everybody? Or let the chips fall where they may?

AdviceObsessed will get to Emily’s useless response in a moment. First, though, let’s take a moment on the fundamentals. What is this book for which the LW is sacrificing so many relationships? And does the world—let alone her family—actually need the book?

The LW wants to be a writer, but a writer is supposed to have imagination, and a topic, and she seems to have neither. For instance, in explaining why she writes about her experiences with sex and drugs, she says: “Obviously there would be no essays if I just stayed in and watched Cheers.”

If sex and drugs are the only things she’s got going on, and TV’s her default, that isn’t promising.

But, you say, she writes about sex, and that actually is a topic—a terrific one! And you’re right, if the author is George Eliot, or Leo Tolstoy, for instance, or even just a great romantic stylist. But this LW—going out on a limb, here!—isn’t. And when not in the hands of a master writer, sex slithers inexorably into what I’m guessing her book is: sensationalism, or just pornography.

Or, in other words, whatever the author had to say to sell the book.

Now, AdviceObsessed hasn’t read this book, so that’s a caveat. But going by what she told us, the answer to “does the world really need this book” is “it doesn’t look like it.”

This is not what Emily thinks, though she hasn’t read it either. But she sympathizes! Which makes sense, because she and the LW have a lot in common.

For one thing, Emily doesn’t have much imagination either. She, too, published a book of personal essays. For her topic, she poached from the lives of her parents and a close friend.

Emily let the friend see the draft before she sent it to the publisher, but the book ended up changing that friendship anyway, and now she wishes she’d written about something different.

She did not share the draft with her parents, though, because if they’d objected, she’d have had to ignore their objections, or “bowdlerize” her work.

She tells the LW that if she, Emily, could change “a few details” of what she wrote about her parents, “I absolutely would go back in time and do so.” But she always knew they’d want that. That’s why she didn’t tell them about it before she published. And she actually can’t go back in time, can she?

So adding all that up, Emily advises the LW to give her family a heads-up about what will be in her book. “That way,” she writes, “you’ll be dictating the terms of the conversation, and they’ll feel included in your journey.”

Dictating to people…maybe that’s a way to include them, if you stretch a point.

Also, Emily says the LW should tell her relatives she’ll love them “whether or not they approve” of what she’s written! Heck—she should tell them she’ll love them even if they don’t read her book at all!

Deep sigh. If Emily thinks that announcement will change anything, she’s living in a dream world. On the off-chance the LW’s family hasn’t yet figured out what she thinks of them and their values (“conservative;” “married at 22”), they will if they read her book, and a heads-up won’t change that. Warned or not warned, when her book is published, their opinion of her will sink.

Which is exactly what’s bothering the LW. She’s about to be found out! She feels: “slightly insane worrying about other adults reading about sex!”

But she’s not insane at all. Actually, AdviceObsessed finds this confession the most hopeful part of this otherwise sorry column. It tells us she has a family—great! It tells us they mean something to her, or she wouldn’t be agonizing over what they’ll think.

And it shows that despite her tell-all book, the LW is not completely shameless. Like Emily, she’s just managed to suppress her shame until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Emily and the LW are two of a kind. Both of them really, really wanted to publish, and both were willing to sell anything—their parents, their friends, their own privacy—to make it happen.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Emily ends by offering the LW her “utmost sympathy, respect, and solidarity,” and tells her that “other people’s reactions to your work are not your responsibility or your problem.” But this isn’t precisely true.

The LW is publishing a work that will offend people who are important to her. If she’s unhappy about that outcome, she can’t really disclaim responsibility for it. And if the result is that some of these relationships are compromised, it will be her problem, because at some level, she values those people, or she never would have sought Emily’s advice.

So what does AdviceObsessed advise? Maybe the LW could offer her family a candid acknowledgement that as publication looms, she’s second-guessing herself, and hopes they will read her words charitably, if at all.

Or she could say nothing, tell her mom to cool it, try to be a wonderful granddaughter, cousin, etc., and hope for the thing to blow over, in the fullness of time.