I read smut now
a woman's decades-long exploration of spicy fiction
Note: I have been sitting on this post for a while now, feeling a slight apprehension at the thought of publishing it after so many months of silence. Truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever get completely over my imposter syndrome, so I’ll just go ahead and rip the band-aid off. Thank you for still hanging around long enough to read this.
What is this?
My mother stares at me as if she can’t make sense of her innocent little girl. In her hand is a stack of pages and I don’t need to read to know what’s written on them. I can tell my best friend’s handwriting from meters away. It’s always accompanied by stickers: little hearts or cute animals, sometimes a lonely star.
My mother is holding my “smut” pile.
It’s 1997 and my best friend hasn’t yet disappeared inside the closet of Narnia (aka moving to Canada with her family). Our impending break up due to another “friend” has also yet to transpire.
At the time of my mom’s scandalous discovery my best friend and I are each other’s person. We share everything: our love for the Backstreet Boys (especially Nick Carter), dancing to extremely inappropriate music (looking at you LL Cool J) in her living room, talking about our crushes like no one ever knew unrequited love like we did, and riding a bus for 45 minutes to reach the Metropolis in downtown Athens to look for our next favorite CD.
We also share a love for words. We both write letters to each other, we write dedications in our respective diaries and pass these back and forth. We don’t have a name for what we are doing, this ritual of creation, this sharing of intimacy by baring our souls in written and spoken word. I feel connected, alive, and most of all, happy and at ease when we are together. We are both hopeless romantics, always thinking about boys, wondering what it would feel like to be on their radar, to kiss them, touch them, to be seen by them.
She is obsessed with a bad boy who drives a moped and chain-smokes like a truck driver, I am equally obsessed with a blue-eyed boy from a different highschool and a dark brown Devon Sawa hairdo.
Alas, flirting or catching their attention mostly consists of staring at our crushes from afar, making up scenarios in our heads about all the ways we would become an item. And since we are too lacking in self-confidence to do something about our desires, we write these down. We write about our imagined meet-cutes at the beach, at a café, at the club. We write about how they approach us, what we are wearing at the time, about their smiles, holding hands, being close. We write about what we think that intimacy might feel like, physically, in the words we have available in our vocabulary at the time.
Hormones are wreaking havoc in my body: my teen years are covered by a veil of opaque melancholy that renders a dark purple hue over every experience. I write (really bad) love poems expressing a hurt that weighs like an anchor around my neck every waking moment of my adolescence. I also journal about all the injustices suffered at the hands of my brother, about my parents’ fights and, yes, my loneliness. I cry. A LOT.
My mother’s eyes are still hard on me. It’s nothing, just stories, I say and feel sticky shame suffocating me and bubbling anger at her indiscretion. She has looked through my things. She has broken the cardinal rule of letting me know she’s looked through my things. Which is even worse.
I don’t remember my mom’s exact words. Maybe she said “this is inappropriate” , maybe “you shouldn’t be doing this”. Words are irrelevant. Her eyes speak to a disapproval that is transcribed in the bones. I don’t need a dictionary for that kind of blame. She has lifted my skin to look at the veiny, sinewy parts I share with the rest of humanity, only to recoil at the sight. As if she doesn’t have them, too. As if no one does.
The stories she has discovered are tame, to say the least. The furthest my best friend and I ever wrote was of wandering hands exploring soft body parts covered by clothes. Our reaching towards that feeling of unknown pleasure ended abruptly—a rope thrown out to sea to pull out a drowning body, only to sink into undiscovered depths harboring mysteries in the darkness. The body never retrieved.
At the time of my mother’s discovery I have never even kissed a boy. I’m a good girl (not that good girl you little heathens, the actual kind): irrationally afraid of any form of authority, I hate breaking the rules, which results in me being branded as a boring kill-joy.
Writing things down is the only form of pure and free expression. A safe space, a place where I can exist without all the anxiety I feel everyday just being in a changing body.
After my mother leaves, I throw everything out. Every single page of vicarious joy and curious exploration is torn and stuffed in a garbage bag and that’s the end of it. No more imagined universes where I am happy and free, no more staining white pages with the ink of my unripe lust.
I still write poems, I fill journal after journal with school test dates and results, meetups with friends and going dancing. But mostly pages upon pages of boredom. Waiting for something to happen. For me to feel like my life can finally begin.
It’s 2010 and my journals have travelled with me to Germany. I no longer write in them though. I don’t write poems or stories. I’m too busy working, sharing a flat with my boyfriend, meeting friends, traveling, going to clubs, listening to music. It’s a life so easy it is inconspicuous in its happiness. And yet, something is missing.
One day I’m discussing Twilight with a good friend from uni. We’ve both read the books, and despite not loving them, we also couldn’t NOT finish all installments. Our pining teenage versions still alive and kicking underneath the skin of our not fully-set adult selves.
We veer into fanfiction territory and she tells me she’s reading “lemons” in Wattpad. I’ll send you some links, she says. And so I enter a rabbit hole of cliché-filled morally ambiguous characters with toxic traits and an insatiable hunger for sex that borders on the comical. It’s like a drug.
1997-Eliza rises like a zombie from the past. And she is hungry!
If Stephanie Meyer can dream up a story about a vampire falling in love with a teenage girl (cue inappropriate age gap) write multiple books about said couple, propelling lord knows how many people to dream up their own version of lust-filled stories, maybe I wasn’t such a freak after all back in the 90s.
I try my hand at a tame version of such a story once more. I share it with another friend who asks me for more. She wants to follow the characters and see where they end up. I don’t know what to tell her. I have just started writing again after a decade-long hiatus and like the song says, words don’t come easy. But I keep writing. I write short literary stories, flash fiction. I even start a YA novel I quit a while later because it’s bad and it’s served the purpose of getting my butt on the chair and my fingers on the keyboard. Some of my stories are published. I feel elated.
Writing is the thread that ties the pieces of my past, present and future self. It is what I have done since I could hold a pen and practiced my name in neat little lines, it is what I know to do when the feelings are cramping up my body with their neediness, or what calms me when the need to escape the self is irrevocably tied to diving further within it. What a mess!
Life happens though. The writing stops again. Motherhood. A diagnosis. A pandemic. A heartache so deep it is a miracle the body doesn’t permanently bend under its force. And it’s this pain that makes me pick up a pen once again. A purge. A reckoning. It’s inevitable and essential for my survival.
It’s 2025. I’m meeting my best friend from high school for coffee while visiting Greece (she escaped Narnia and the evil jealous “friend”). As always, we talk about books and writing (she has published a novel and writes articles for an Athenian newspaper). I tell her I’ve read All Fours. I talk about the main character’s self-discovery journey, her lust for a younger body, her identity crisis, wants etc. during perimenopause. Even though I can’t completely relate to the main character, there are many elements of the book that do feel relatable. We veer onto the subject of writing sex. She tells me she’s reading spicy romances. Really? I say. Can I borrow one?
When I come back to Germany life resumes. The news are getting worse and worse every day. There is a curtain of doom draping over everything, dangerously close to smothering me under its weight. I float outside of my body. I am a robot of domestic to-do lists, going through the motions of every day, not fully aware of how the machinery inside me works.
Despite writing pretty consistently after joining an online creative writing community in 2023, I’m blocked and uninspired. Everything is a struggle. And when it’s not, I’m too exhausted to make it so, by bleeding onto the page.
One night I pick up the spicy romance my friend lent me. And I disappear into a world of tension, sex, and intrigue. I read like I am drowning and the novel is an oxygen mask attached to my face making me light-headed with air as I re-enter my body.
I devour 12 books in the span of a few months. I have never read this fast and this late into the night despite my 6:00 a.m. alarm every day. I go with four hours of sleep for the first time since my children have started sleeping relatively decently through the night.
There is a purple kind of joy in reading about sex and lust. About tortured characters who ultimately always get a happy ending. Some of the books are mediocre. Some are bad. Some are very good. Same as with any other genre, there is a spectrum of authors to discover and I am greedy to find the right ones for me. It is comforting knowing there is a space for this kind of story-telling, and the space is occupied mostly by women who share their preferences with others through social media. They rave about their favorite books, suggest new releases, make funny videos with audiobook voice-overs. It’s 1997 all over again. Only now there is no shame in reading or writing these stories. Not amongst the smut-obsessed women who are not afraid to say they like the books they like. It is liberating.
I remember a workshop I once attended in Sustenance, where we explored writing the erotic. One of the things I vaguely remember talking about with Joy, our community leader, is that the erotic doesn’t necessarily have to involve the sexual. More so, it has to do with being inside the body. Sucking on a ripe peach, juice licking down a hungry chin. Feeling the breeze on goosebump-pebbled skin. Marveling at the bright fuchsia blooms of a magnolia tree. And good smut (in my opinion) isn’t necessarily about the freakiest, kinkiest sex interactions. It is about bringing the reader into their own body and exploring, safely, a universe where a person existing with all their desires and needs, isn’t a sin or a thing to be flogged and punished for merely feeling.
It is not lost on me that the recommendation that set me down the path of spicy novels currently, came from the best friend I used to exchange such stories with when we were impressionable 15 year-olds.
Between several voice messages talking about the heart-wrenching, gut-punching character arc of A Little Life (a masterpiece by all accounts) we also discuss the novel I recommended to her that had me thinking about faith, religion, and sex.
Maybe (and this is my take on the success of the genre) the nature of erotica, spicy novels, lemons, however you want to call writing about carnal, primal needs, is not purely self-indulgent and voyeuristic. Maybe, it is about women telling other women (since women make up the staggering majority of smut writers and readers) it’s ok to be in your body. However that may feel. Let’s make up a world where we can have fun and play pretend. Let’s escape a reality of pain, bills, appointments, and obligations for a couple of hours.
We can remember what it’s like to feel the self, and not just try to escape it. There is nothing wrong with wanting that.
I'm so glad you decided to post this, and I seriously hope I get to read your delicious book of smut one day! xo