Good in Bed Read Free Page A

third-floor apartment in a brick rowhouse on Monroe Street in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. I had, thanks to my recent breakup, a lot of free time.
    So I set out to write a story of a girl who was a lot like me and a guy who was a lot like Satan; a story in which the girl gets a fairy-tale happy ending, fame and fortune and a man who loved her, because at the time I had serious doubts as to whether I’d ever get any of those things myself. I had all the confidence that goes along with never having written an entire novel before: no editor, no agent, no readers waiting to see what I’d come up with. Just me and my computer and the characters in my head.
    I had an idea of what the story would be, loosely based on the underpinnings of
Shining Through
, one of my favorite Isaacs novels: young woman pines for the wrong man, while the right guy is waiting in the wings … and, in between the romantic whiplash, young woman becomes a hero. Isaacs’s Linda Voss saved the world as a spy in World War II era Germany. I had no such grand ambitions for my heroine, Cannie Shapiro. If I gave her happiness and success with friends, career, and romance, that would be plenty. I’d make her a big girl, too, a size 16 who gets a happy ending, whose weight loss is a tragedy as opposed to the key to happiness. In 1998, the year of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, where the party who got the most grief was not the president, for lying and cheating and abusing his power, but the girl he cheatedwith, for the unpardonable sin of not being skinny. The notion that a big girl could be the star of her own story without undergoing a magical makeover was (and, sadly, remains), a pretty radical one.
    Oh, and I had one more thing: a title.
    A year or two before, I’d dated a fellow freelance writer who ended up getting a gig with
Cosmopolitan
, writing one of those columns that all lady magazines seem required by law to have, the column in which a Man Tells All, revealing the Ten Spots You Should Touch Him, or Five Moves That Will Have Him Yelping Like a Dog, or Three Tricks to Try in Bed Tonight (for whatever reason, numbering the tricks and moves and heretofore unrevealed erogenous zones have become a necessary component of these stories). I remember glancing at the article, noticing the byline, giving a shrug and thinking that if the guy was some kind of sexual savant, he’d done an excellent job of hiding it when we’d been together.
    But then I started wondering: What if you were a girl who’d broken up with a guy who’d then landed the man-tells-all column at a Cosmo-like magazine? What if he started writing about you—your lovemaking, your body, your issues with sex and your body—and everyone who knew the two of you recognized you in the columns? How would you survive it? What would you do?
    It seemed like a promising basis for a book; a book that would take its title from the title of the man-tells-all column in my fictitious magazine:
Good in Bed.
    It took about nine months, start to finish, to complete the five-hundred-page single-spaced rough draft that I wrote in great, furious bursts in my spare bedroom, with the primary goal of making myself feel better, of clawing out of the black hole of my breakup and dragging myself back into the light.
    There was so much I didn’t know—things like how long a book was supposed to be, or that you should never submit a single-spaced manuscript to a publisher. There were things I couldn’t guess at, like the way books by and about women would come to be viewed as a dangerous threat to legitimate literature. God help me, if I’d known that part, I might not have written the thing at all.
    But I wrote it. Then I put it in a shoebox and slid the box under my bed. Six weeks later, I pulled it out and tried to read it as a reader, not as its author.
Maybe there’s something there
, I thought.
Maybe other people will think so, too.
    My