An anthology of true stories about sex, edited by Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O’Connell.
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Tactile satisfaction
…I am almost done with Coming and Crying and I feel like I’ve had my heart ripped out and then delicately replaced. The mark of a small printer is all over this book, occasional typos, pages that are not perfectly smooth—some are wrinkled—and look as if there are strands of hair locked between the pages. I feel as if I’ve been reading this with someone, or having it read to me. I can see us being distracted by some of the more triumphant stories and sharing our own, I can see us recovering over some of the more forlorn moments. The point is, this book, like all books, is magic. The difference here being that this is a magic on a scale I have not reacted to in ages. There is a visceral pull to this book that I don’t think I’ve felt since I read Stone Butch Blues as a wee new-trans kid in high school. I have teared up, I have felt enraged, I have felt vindicated. More than anything, though, I have felt inspired.
The thing about personal essays is that it is incredibly hard to write them well. It is easy to make the story resonate, but it is hard to have the stories—especially within an anthology—uniformly reach into you and stir you. In the end, an essayist is writing for strangers. They are reaching out and sharing with people they never know and, in stories about sex, lust, loving, or the absence of those things, they are often literally baring something of themselves. Now, I can’t speak to how much of themselves these authors have shared, though I would suspect it is a kernel of something that not every stranger gets to enjoy. I feel incredibly privileged having read this book and I can only hope that everyone I share it with feels the same.
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