Free The Art of Intimacy by Stacey D'Erasmo Page A

this effect in her book The Empire of Love, which looks critically at what she terms “the intimacy diaspora” after the Enlightenment.) It’s all too easy to throw a little intimacy, especially damaged intimacy, at a narrative to get it to seem serious and literary. Like corn syrup, it fills stuff out and makes it tasty. We’re accustomed to its value. To which the struggling (always struggling) writer might well respond, So what? Intimacy does matter. What’s the harm in relying on that? Don’t we come to literature to try to understand what it is to be alive? Aren’t we all trying to connect?
    The harm, it seems to me as a struggling writer among other struggling writers, is that piety of any kind is never especially good for art. Characters can, and should, believe in all kinds of things, passionately and with brilliant wrongheadedness, but the book is, generally speaking, up to something else, something broader, something less sure of itself. Questions the writer might ask herself as she struggles to bring a sense of intimacy onto the page are, What assumptions am I making about what intimacy is? What received ideas about intimacy am I perhaps unwittingly reproducing? Many might immediately think of demographic categories—cultural assumptions that this sort of person can’t be with that sort of person; this one is the wrong gender, race, age, body size for that one; intimacies such as domestic heterosexual love, preferably with children, are the Big Stories and everything else is a footnote or a curiosity. One might question these assumptions.
    One might also question easy gender stereotypes about intimacy: women only want love and men only want sex; women are better at intimacy than men; female friendship is always fraught with poisonous competitiveness, especially for male attention; mothers resent daughters; fathers abandon sons; women are needy and manipulative; men are disappointing and selfish; and so on. While one is at it, one could also question received ideas about sex and sexual identity: men are dogs and women are victims; sex within marriage is always boring and adultery is always thrilling but emotionally false; women are dying to get married; gay men are promiscuous and amusing; lesbians are hyperdomestic and faithful; bisexuals are untrustworthy tricksters who probably don’t even really exist; female orgasm is a difficult and often comic pursuit; children being sexually abused feel numb; orgasm is always pleasurable; real sex is between people who are in love and any other kind of sex is shallow and empty; one-night stands make you feel sad and sticky the next day; men with younger partners are lucky and women with younger partners are pathetic and probably have had bad plastic surgery; mothers don’t have sex; fathers never get as much sex as they want and will inevitably turn to the (female, nubile, witless or sometimes conniving) babysitter; “foreplay” is a category; “slut” is a category; everyone’s primary drive is sexual; sexual identity is fixed at the age of three. And so on. As one who teaches writing, I’ve read a supernatural amount of fiction that traffics in ideas and judgments about all kinds of intimacy that, at the very least, might be brought to the level of consciousness before being committed to the page.
    But beyond these received ideas, cultural anxieties, and judgments, the writer might also ask herself if she is really so sure about what she’s describing, if she has looked closely enough at the bond she is exploring in her work. Let us take, for instance, a well-worn cultural stereotype: the older, successful man with the younger, pretty woman on his arm. Often, one of two assumptions immediately spring onto the page. The first is that he is making use of her as sex toy and badge of his prowess (see: The Dying Animal, Rabbit Redux, etc.). The second is that she is making use of him as financial mark or psychological cat’s paw (see: the film The Blue Angel,