“I committed myself to an experiment: Could I write about this provocative subject matter—the adult movie business—and what someone who works in the adult movie business would describe as a ‘civilian’s’ encounter with it in a style that could be published in The New Yorker?”
In a recent interview with Janelle Drumwright’s Publishing Diaries, I shared the story behind “Topical Matters,” a fictional short story I wrote about a sexagenarian who discovers an adult movie is being filmed in the house behind his house in the San Fernando Valley. I explain how I came up with the idea for the story—I visited an adult movie set, my back hurt, I found a religious tract with a cover that read “What is the Mark of the BEAST” tucked under my windshield wiper—and how I wrote it, from drafting to revising to deciding when it was finished.
Because the interview was for a general audience, I didn’t get much into the more prurient aspects of the tale. This was a story about an adult movie set, after all; it wasn’t about a picnic in the park. As I recount in the interview, I was about 4,000 words into what would be a 5,000-word story when I became stuck.
In the final section of the story, the hero, Stuart, a recently retired advertising copywriter, is in a bathroom in the house where the adult movie is being filmed. As he stands in front of the mirror, he tries to decide what to do. Does he go downstairs and watch the making of this explicit film? Or does he flee the house and return to his house and his relatively banal life and wife?
“In an alternate reality, he told himself, he would do the right thing. He would heed the warning of the religious tract a stranger had left on his doorstep and which he had tried to hide in hopes of concealing what it seemed to know of him.”
When I realized I was at a creative impasse, I discussed the matter with my shrink. During my therapy session, I announced what I had to do with Stuart. Shortly after that session ended, I realized I had to do the opposite. Basically, the issue was: What does Stuart see? As he stands in front of the bathroom mirror, he recalls a past transgression. Even though I created Stuart in my head, I’m not entirely sure why he made the decision that he did in the end of the story. But I do know that when one is presented with the opportunity to look—to really see—it is hard to look away.
There’s a great deal that’s not in the story: the details of Stuart’s relationship to his “depressed” mother and the complexities of his connection (or lack thereof) to his “distant” father among them. By the time of the telling of the story, both of his parents are long dead, but they continue to shadow his actions.
What one sees when one views pornography is pretty straightforward. What is at play behind this seeing is where things get interesting. In my case, a covert narcissist mother and an emotionally unavailable father shaped the story of my life, one in which I ended up going to Porn Valley. Maybe part of what we witness when we watch adult content or its making is the dream of a world in which no mother is depressed, no father is distant, and the star of the show is ecstatic.
Susannah Breslin is an investigative journalist and the author of the acclaimed investigative memoir Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. She has written for The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Atlantic, among other publications. Email.
I read the story. I liked it. Nice work.