A while back I was chuckling to myself, thinking that in this series I'm doing I've managed to write about sweet sex, angry sex, sad sex, worried sex, group sex, drunk sex, triumphant sex, blow-the-top-off sex -- you get the idea. Since that realization I've added a few more layers. (We're now talking 5 books here.)

And though I've never been pregnant (an am in fact voluntarily sterilized), I've written about pregnancy, armed with books like Our Bodies, Our Selves and Alison Bechdel's Spawn of Dykes To Watch Out For (as far as I know, Bechdel has never been pregnant, either).

Each of the first 4 books had one "oh, shit" scene, which I define as a scene that comes to me, that I don't expect, and that elicits the response, "Oh, shit, I can't write about that! But I have to." It was the death of a child in Book 1, a sexual dominance scene in Book 2, a rape-and-revenge scene in Book 3 (I had to meditate for a full day before I could write that one), and a mutilation scene in Book 4 (the actual mutilation occurred offstage, but was clear enough in the aftermath). Book 5, which I just finished drafting yesterday, has no sudden "oh, shit" scenes, because I knew from the very beginning that the tough scenes were coming. That didn't make them any less hard to write.

Book 5 is the volume most fueled by my mother's long battle with coronary sclerosis and two major heart attacks before her death in 1982 at age 57 (I was 23; she suffered her first heart attack when I was 10). That book has two major deaths in it -- one of a strong but minor character who'd been around since the end of the first book, and one of a major character who'd been around since the very beginning and whose death heralds the ascendancy of a new generation. I drew on my experience of watching my mother die when writing about the later death, which is a slow process throughout the book and which comes to a head in the end.

And, holy crap, writing those scenes was hard. Between them and a big catharsis scene involving that major character and the major character from the new generation, I loaded up three hankies with tears and snot. And I found the right music to headphone myself into on auto-repeat-ad-infinitum just so I could heighten that sense of creative masochism. (The death of a character at the end of the 4th book draws from my father's suicide in 2002. Definitely a scene for Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead, especially since Rachmaninoff had been my father's favorite composer.)

I do want to say here that the books also have their light moments, and #5 probably has the greatest number of humorous scenes. Sometimes the characters turn around in the middle of the crap they're going through and do stuff that just makes me crack up. And then I go, "Yay! Thanks, I needed that!" One of the "tough" scenes I'd planned for Book #3 got turned around into something funny just because a character made his entrance with a line that changed its tone entirely.

I transplant a lot of personal detail and emotion into my fiction. I also let the personal nonfiction out of the bag, the most wrenching example of that being the essay that just appeared in Reed #60 (and if the editor, who is on Tribe, sees this post, please let me know if I can give your nom-de-Tribe here so I can give a proper thanks!). I've changed the names in that piece for the sake of privacy, even though the events in it occurred more than 20 years ago (the essay is a polished version of my journal entry from then), because it deals with domestic violence, including that experienced by someone other than myself.

As for what's happened with my cousin, I have journal entries, taped phone calls (at her insistence), and scads of raw data for when I can get to writing about that. Because it really does deserve a book. But in addition to the emotional layer, it is extremely convoluted because it deals with my cousin's invented life that I believed in for decades, and collusion on the part of her family, and drug-induced whatevers. So in addition to being an emotional nightmare, it's a logistical nightmare that I'm still trying to untangle from a narrative perspective. And since it's still in probate, with various tangles involved in that, I'm staying away from the writing for my own legal sanity as well.

One side note of interest on how times have changed -- 20+ years ago I was a member of a peer professional workshop, meaning that all of us had been published in and paid by major magazines or publishers in the genre. Back then I workshopped some of my polished journal material. One of the workshop participants said, "I just feel as if you've walked in front of all of us naked." I also read a couple of poems as part of a radio show in 1985 -- one of them about my sterilization -- that elicited very strong responses from the listening audience, both yea and nay. On the other hand, I don't know if I would have gotten sterilized had I not read and been inspired by Marge Piercy's extraordinary poem, "The Sabbath of Mutual Respect," in 1980. I'd read it as part of her collection The Moon Is Always Female. It is also posted at
www.soulrebels.com/beth/bos/sabbath.html

>>That said, I could probaly never write about a character who was pregnant.

I would like to say the same! Unfortunately I have a whole part of a book upcoming where the main character is pregnant! I don't want to do it, didn't intend to do it, but the character got pregnant anyway! Sheesh! Now I have to write about it and, as I have never been pregnant either, that will be interesting.