When the Time is Write: On Having a Lot to Say

The delightful Frankie Bergstein, Grace and Frankie

I’ve got a lot to say. I always have.

When I was in second grade, a teacher wrote on my narrative report card that I was a “firecracker” who couldn’t be restrained in class, partly because I had so many thoughts I wanted to share. Her job, she implied, was to figure out how to make me more manageable. I was, in other words, “too much.”

In adulthood, I’m learning to love my too-muchness. It’s who I am. You want major enthusiasm? You want opinions? You want details? You want analysis of those details? Then I’m your girl.

This is my first blog entry, and if I’m able to follow through on my plans, there’ll be many more. What follows below are some semi-corralled and fairly self-indulgent thoughts on why I’m here in the first place, and what I care about as a writer and reader of sapphic romance. Most of what you’ll find in future blog posts will be focused on writing, craft, and process. I’m fascinated by all the bones. I have so much to say about them.

It’s my hope that, if you’re reading this, you’re at least a little fascinated by the bones too. Let’s be fascinated together!

Why write?

You know that Barbie meme where people rephrase Ken’s line “My job is beach” to fit their own work or passions? My job is word.

Not book or story. For me, book and story are what comes out of word. Word is the root of everything. It’s the cell of the narrative system, and it’s what I care about most when it comes to writing.

I’ve spent my entire life trying to find the right words. For a very long time, I didn’t have them. It took me until my twenties to find the accurate ones to describe myself, and until my thirties to understand what those words really meant to me. I’m still finding new definitions for them. I’m still looking for more language.

We all know that language can’t ever fully capture the real thing. But it can get very, very near. For me, writing is about finding the word or words that get us closest to the feeling, the experience, the relationship, the reality. That happens on the micro level, too, not just the macro level. The stories I love most understand that each individual word matters.

I’m a writer because I never want to stop trying to get close.

Why sapphic romance?

On an episode of the fabulous podcast she co-hosts with Liz Grey, writer Macon Leigh says that growing up, she believed that “the part of me that loves was the worst part of me.” I haven’t stopped thinking about that statement since I first heard it.

Like most queer people, I’ve struggled with some internalized shame about my sexuality. Yes, I’m incredibly proud to be a lesbian. I believe, without a doubt, that my queerness touches everything good about myself, and that if I wasn’t a lesbian, my life would be a much darker place. But I haven’t fully let go of that scared voice inside me, the one who feels alone and wrong. To some extent, it’ll probably always be with me.

Writing sapphic romance is a way for me to challenge that shame. On some level, I’m writing for teenage Carrie, who had a secret she couldn’t even look at because it felt too terrifying to acknowledge. Look, I’m telling her. You’re not alone. You’re not broken. You’ll be okay. There are so many people out there just like you.

But there’s more to it than that. The brilliant Lou Morgan notes that “[i]n a world where lesbians are still marginalised and discriminated against for loving other women, books that treat our relationships with dignity are quietly revolutionary. Representation is affirming because it recognises the beauty of lesbian love.” Although I agree wholeheartedly with what Lou writes here, I also believe sapphic romance can extend beyond the goal of representation. I think we can aim for liberation.

At its most powerful, sapphic romance has the potential to liberate us from longstanding systems that disappear and disempower those who identify as sapphic, lesbian, bi, or pan. I don’t think we’re there yet as a community—we have some major work we need to do with regards to centering sapphics of color, disabled sapphics, and other marginalized voices—but the potential is remarkable.

No one else will do this for us. We can’t look to corporate media for affirmation when it sees us only as dollar signs. We can’t take crumbs and call it a meal.

Am I saying I want to write liberating sapphic romance? No. Liberation isn’t something that can be done by an individual. I want to add my voice to the hundreds of others who are writing us, for us. I want to uplift others who have experiences and perspectives I don’t. I want to be part of something bigger than myself.

What will you find in my books?

Let’s say you take a chance on something I write. What are some of my priorities, my interests, and my fascinations? What should you expect to see?

Female MCs over thirty. For the record, I have nothing at all against YA, NA, or characters in their twenties—I’m very glad those books exist for readers who want them!—but in my writing, I tend to gravitate towards female MCs who have lived a little more life. It’s also really fun to try and capture, with older characters, that intense emotional energy that’s so thrilling in YA/NA books.

Repression. My favorite form of tension to explore! Why? Because the flip side of repression is explosive release, which is—let’s face it—really hot. Repression is one of the reasons why I enjoy reading ice queens so much. As Roslyn Sinclair writes, “The colder and more closed-off [ice queens] seem, the hotter they’re guaranteed to be beneath that frozen surface. They’re full of pent-up passion that’s just dying to break free.” Repressed characters usually aren’t acknowledging a part of themselves that desperately needs to be seen, and that strain between self and need will inevitably snap.

Lots of sex. I love writing sex scenes, and you’ll always find some pretty explicit ones in my books. They’re a fantastic way to explore character dynamics and to get at the core of a character’s vulnerabilities. Just as no two people in real life have sex in the same way, no two fictional couples have sex in the same way. I’m fascinated by the questions sex scenes pose. What do these two people find hot, and why? Are they able to go after what they want, or verbalize it, or are they holding back? How well do they understand their own desire? How do they reveal themselves?

A blend of humor and heartache. I’ll never write a book without angst. Again, I'm thrilled they exist (one of my all-time favorite sapphic romances is Jae’s Wrong Number, Right Woman, which is almost entirely angst-free), but as a writer, I’m really interested in examining difficult emotions, old wounds, and painful feelings as part of two characters’ journey towards a happily ever after. This doesn’t mean, however, that it’s all angst, all the time. Humor is an essential part of anything I write. I aim to make readers laugh just as much as I aim to make them emotional—sometimes in the same scene.

Jewishness. As a Jewish woman, I feel very strongly about writing Jewish books. To me, that means incorporating Jewishness in ways that speak directly to Jewish readers, although I welcome Gentile readers and hope they’ll enjoy it too! My Jewish characters have Jewish perspectives. Their ethnoreligious identities impact how they move through the world, how they see others, and how they see themselves.

Queer processing. My characters have complicated relationships with their queerness. And they talk about it. Not all the time, or most of the time, but in ways that feel necessary to them and to me. Their journeys towards embracing queer joy require them to grapple with queer pain. They arrive at a happy ending, but they get there by acknowledging that unhappiness can sometimes be generative, too.

There’s a lot more I’m interested in exploring, of course. I don’t want to give away everything too soon, especially when my first book, Loser of the Year, is still eleven months away from publication. I know it’s a little presumptive to share all of this with you when I’m not even a published author yet. But it feels nice, too. A first step towards the writer I want to be and the writer I’m becoming. One step of many.

To paraphrase Frankie Bergstein: the time is right. I’ve got a lot to say. Come be “too much” with me.