I know something about this, having grown up as the child of a fiction writer. When my mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published her first novel, "Ending," in 1974, it featured a scene in which a woman performs oral sex on her dying husband: "I kneeled and made a carpet of our clothing on the floor, and I led him down inside me." After the novel came out, Brian Spiviano went roaring down the ninth-grade hall, shouting, "Read Page 180! Read Page 180!"

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 3:17 PM  |