In honor of producing two erotic classics on Audible— Carrie's Story and Safe Word— I decided to interview the author, Molly Weatherfield, about what it was like to create one of the most enduring erotic heroines of all time.
Susie: What was going on in your life when you first started writing Carrie's Story?
Molly: In the 1990s I was working hard as a computer programmer in the San Francisco Financial District and doing some non-fiction writing about cyberpunk, cyberspace, and the computer workplace automation.
My husband was honcho-ing and book ordering at Modern Times, San Francisco's longtime leftwing bookstore in the Mission District; our lovely son Jesse was in high school and we were worrying about how to pay for college.
My life was rolling by as it does at that stage of work and child-rearing.
On the other hand, I'd been thinking really hard my longtime private fantasy life. It was hardcore BDSM. How did that fit, I wondered, with my upbeat, workoholic wife-and-mother life— not to speak of my feminist politics?
This is where you come in, Susie. You, and Carol Queen, Amber Hollibaugh, Gayle Rubin, Pat (Patrick) Califia.
You were all in SF, often at Modern Times, in a lively debate (not to speak of serious political struggle) with other feminists, about sex and power, image and fetish and fantasy.
This whole bunch of smart women were challenging the nicey-nicey/no power/no objectification ethos of politically correct feminism, by taking on the unholy anti-porn alliance between Dworkin/McKinnon crowd and the Reagan administration.
What you all were saying just sang to me. I began reading porn by Pat and Carol, by Anne Rice, by gay male writers like the late John Preston and the brilliant Aaron Travis. I tried to make sense of it, to understand what this fantasy life meant for -- and about -- me.
My husband, it turned out, had been cherishing some corresponding inner narratives. I sort of knew it all along— funny how that goes...
S: Have you ever had a long-term ritualized erotic-role relationship? —Or just for a night or two?
M: Oh, I play. But I'm such a wimp -- I'm lucky if I can keep it up for a night at a time.
For me, a little actuality goes a long way.
But I do have the discipline to write it in some depth, to pay attention to pacing, p.o.v., composition. A quote from Anne Rice's Exit to Eden sums it up for me: "It's the voice, I think."
S: Who in your life most resembles Carrie? Who are her historical antecedents?
M: Carrie is the classic smartgirl voice. I've heard that voice since I was eight years old and first met Jo March from Little Women. She's Jane Eyre and Hermione Granger and the little-known Lucy Snowe from Charlotte Bronte's amazing Villette.
Carrie insists on being known and loved for who she truly is. If her body has learned the submissive moves, her mind will always reserve a margin of snarky humor and integrity.
Many of the women I love have some "Carrie" in them, I think, probably because they also learned to be who they are in conversation with these beloved literary heroines.
I'm not a very brave person in the real world, but I've learned about bravery and integrity from the world of literary smartgirls, and I wanted to write an erotic book in that tradition.
S: Why, in a sea of novels of S/M and D/S characters, both romantic and erotic, do you think Carrie clicked? What did you hear from the fans, in this respect?
M: Isn't that amazing? Almost twenty years and sixteen printings since I sent you a first draft, I'm still parsing it out.
You're right, a lot of what I've learned has been from my astute readers. By following my imagination as far as it would take me, I've tuned in to a kind of pervasive mood, a mode of trade-off between mind and body that a lot of BDSM actors and fantasists share.
We like to play with the boundaries of our autonomy and individuality. We're insistent that this includes our critical intelligence. We're serious about what happens when we're in control and what happens when we let go.
That's why all the elaborate rules and rituals exist to enact those complexities, and bring us to those borders and boundaries.That's also why I spent so much time representing the tension between the action, the scenarios, and Carrie's internal dialogues. (And Jonathan's too, in Carrie's sequel, Safe Word.)
I'm also tuned into humorous aspect of fancy, deliberate, fetishistic sex. —The way that consciousness makes the elaboration just a little silly. —The way the details, costumes, and props are irresistible and yet stagy, so predictable, so sorta... babyish?
When I first wrote these elements of humor and irony, I thought I might offend some true believers, Stalinists, maybe, in black leather.
But that hasn't happened at all. Au contraire, it seems that the wonky people who go for BDSM also enjoy the opportunity to laugh at their secret obsessions.
S: You're known to friends and colleagues as an uppity woman. The strong woman figure is often not imagined as vulnerable or yielding. Do you have doubters who find your story of "surrender" to be surprising?
M: I don't know if I'm all that uppity, but I am committed to my progressive political beliefs. I act on them and speak up, as we all need to do in these crazed times.
That said, NOBODY who knows me was surprised to find out what a romantic I am. Isn't the "surrender" central to the romantic impulse?
And anyway— as a romance writer, I know just how uppity, activist, energetic and remarkable a community of women we are.
S: You now focus on Regency romance. What is it about the Regency era that speaks to you?
M: Much of historical romance is set during the Regency (the period, broadly speaking, between ~1800 and 1830: the Jane Austen/Patrick O'Brian era).
It's fun to be part of the enthusiastic community of writers who set their books during that period, to get obsessive with my writing girlfriends about authentic custom and costume. (If it's on the cover of a romance novel, it probably isn't in the least bit authentic).
It's also fun to fan the smoldering erotic flames under the Austen-ish manners and to re-read Jane every so often just to stay in the game.There's also the hot-ness of the men's clothes, gorgeously described in Anne Hollander's history of costume, Sex and Suits.
Having said all that, I'm not married to the period.
My first romance novel is set in a rather different time and place, in France before the Revolution. The Bookseller's Daughter, (soon to be re-issued by Samhain Books), was inspired by Robert Darnton's research on smutty and political literature which was smuggled past the French censors and sold by booksellers as "philosophical books."
This was fascinating to me, as an erotic writer married to a progressive bookseller. I decided to write a sexy historical romance novel, set in the early 1780s, in the French book trade and in a chateau in Provence. The Marquis de Sade has a walk-on role, and I like to think that it's the one of my romances that Carrie could have written.
S: I once wrote a story, thinking of Story of O, where I nicknamed Carrie’s Story as “chateau porn." Did that click for you?
M: It does click, though my memory is that the first person to call it that was my husband and most astute reader, Michael. Whoever said it first, however, it's a totally apposite term.
To me, "the chateau" is the hermetic world where the stagy, hierarchical rules of BDSM obtain.
It's the mythic place you want to think is there but don't quite believe exists until somehow someone opens the door and there you are. It takes a kind of magic chosenness -- the way Carrie is "chosen" by Jonathan.
I could write a whole essay on chateau porn, from Roland Barthes' essay "Sade, Fourier, Loyola" to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her posse discovering that "vampires are real" after all. Maybe someday. But what I'd prefer to write now, is Carrie's third act -- a more grownup Carrie -- finding her way into the chateau, just one time more. I'd feel very blessed— and chosen— if I could pull that off.
Carrie's Story and Safe Word, on Audible, are narrated by Shana Savage, and William Sharpe. Superb!
