How to Write A "Taboo" Book

Katie Figures Out How to Write A Book About Sex And Trauma

My first book has found a home! (Go agent Reiko! Editor Denise! All the survivors who bravely shared their stories! All the friends who listened to me ~figure this thing out~ at pubs at 3am and in workshops and over zoom!) Check out the very official announcement:

I particularly appreciate that the first three characters in the announcement are s-e-x and that that sequence of letters appears seven times in this short snippet. Can you tell this book is about sex? Sexuality? Sexual assault?

(If you want to be interviewed for this book, add your info here.)

Working on this project has been a privilege. What started as a couple of articles about sexual assault survivors’ sex lives (including my own) became the seed of an idea for a book. That idea slowly but surely grew into a book proposal, and that proposal has finally found a place (publisher) to turn into a real book.

To me, writing a book proposal for an as-yet-unwritten book is like summarizing something that is basically fictional aka does not exist, and therefore a special kind of torture. How do you summarize a chapter that hasn’t been written—one that might not even make the first draft? Remind me never to submit on proposal ever again. (Just kidding, it’s practically unavoidable!)

So what are the plans for this newsletter?

Here in this newsletter you’ll find the process story: what it’s like to brainstorm, research, interview, draft, write, edit, re-write, fact check, and cover every surface in my apartment—including the floor—with post its. I’m not just talking about the book manuscript, which I really start working on today. I already did all of that just for the book proposal.

As you can see, there is a lot of process to process. And to me, process, background, and context are the most interesting part. Like this:

I store all of my books about sex and most of my books about trauma on a big shelf in the corner of my apartment, the area hardest to reach on purpose and most likely to make you leave immediately if you end up there by accident. There’s the aggressive house plant overgrowth; one of those daylight lamps that, while healthy for your brain, also kind of blinds you; and also a literal trashcan. I position these books so carefully because while I’m excited to talk about my own forthcoming book, I don’t like when it’s sprung upon me by a stray visitor. That’s more or less what I’ve heard from people like me, sexual assault survivors who are willing to have difficult and also rewarding conversations about our sex lives, because we want to help people. But we put up boundaries, for our own sake, too: bookshelves draped in plants and flanked by trash cans and the near actual sun. We want to talk, and we also need to hold the reins, for safety. It’s something I respect with all my interviewees, in our conversations and on the page. So, readers, I hope we’ll have important conversations about these heavy and uplifting topics and the process that goes into writing about them, and I hope you’ll keep in mind my and my community’s literal and metaphorical bookcase. Consent! Process! There we go.

Sign up and join me for this slightly less than edited journey down the rabbit’s hole: how do you interview lovely humans about taboo subjects while making sure we all feel A-okay about it? How do you turn a zillion interviews full of half-formed sentences and at times quarter-formed thoughts, into a chapter of a real live book? How do you write a book people might, hopefully, read? Am I the first Simon to write a book? Hint: I am not, but almost no one else knows about the other Simon’s other book. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, tell your friends! And if you have a story you want to share, sign up so we can chat here.