Always Our Parents' Children

Yesterday during the lockdown I finished Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep - one of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2005 - which I enjoyed.  While I couldn't relate with the boarding school high school experience, much of the high school experience is universal.   Sittenfeld captured teenage insecurity in a deeply familiar voice, until...  The novel's final chapter took, um, a change of tone...a Judy Blume's Forever-esque change of tone...

Page 291 in the paperback edition of Prep: Bow-chika-wow-wow!

I blushed!!  The novel's back-matter included "A Conversion with Curtis Sittenfeld", the transcript of Katie Bacon's interview of Sittenfeld for The Atlantic Monthly.  I'd pass on that kind of thing, but being lockdown-bored, I skimmed it.  At one point Sittenfeld divulged that both her parents thought the novel would have been better without the last chapter, which they felt was unnecessarily graphic.  Bacon follows up:

Bacon:  The sex scenes are fairly explicit.  It must have been a hard thing to know that your parents were going to read them. 

Sittenfeld:  I think it's one of those things that as you're writing you can't think about.  It would just be paralyzing.  There are plenty of cases where if I had known the level of scrutiny the book would receive I might have done things differently.  As I was writing the book, I knew people would wonder, Is this true?  But I didn't want that to determine how I wrote it.  And I didn't want to write the book in sch a way that I hoped it would reflect flatteringly on me.  I didn't want to write a book where my main goal was to make people think that I, that author, was a charming person. I wanted to do what I felt was in the book's interest, not in my own best interest.

The question touched a subject I've long semi-obsessed:  Do others consider what their parents' reactions when releasing adult-themed material?  I wouldn't think of anything else, not escape that existential dread.  The, actors that do love scenes, teenage actresses that do topless scenes, can they take their parents to the premier with pride? (Those are my daughter's #$%@!!)  Numerous social scientists, even friends in my cohort, wrote dissertations on teenagers' sexual activity.  For me, that topic was clearly off-limits to me.  How could I have answered my mom when she asked what I was doing my PhD in?  She might think, "my son the pervert?!"  I always imagined certain career-paths were reserved for orphans.

Sittenfeld is the mature artist I am not, I'm also an extreme case.  So shy am I, I feared being able to kiss my own bride at our wedding (All those people looking at me, and "turn around, Mom!!").  I anticipate the embarrassment accompanying that announcement that my wife and I are expecting our first child.  This statement equivocally announces, "several months ago, we had sex".  Given how little has changed in the past fifteen years, I wouldn't expect too much from the next five.  The Mrs. might need to handle that announcement.  I'll stand by her, eyes to the ground.