My initial idea for this story came from a mixture of my earliest desires to write in a meaningful way, and my memories of my first illicit sexual experiences. By the age of seventeen or so, in my heart-of-hearts, I was determined to see it through. And in the end, this book idea took roughly thirty five years to mature.
Seventeen years ago, as the new millennium approached and my life entered a new phase of its own, the idea came out of its long dormancy and, as a seedling concept, it began to sprout.
For ten years, in odd fits and starts the story tentatively reached out with small tendrils of promise and short seasons of growth, but without producing much more than a few solid roots for the far reaching and important story that I had in mind.
Then, seven years ago, after achieving a breakthrough in my vision for the story the greater construction and rather unique design of the novel finally emerged.
One of the most surprising and significant things about the final stages of the initial creation of this book is that it changed its format from a shock-aimed non-fiction exhibition into a transgressive fictional flight of narrative experience.
The primary reason for this creative shift is that I suddenly realized that for year upon year I had continued to make the mistake of believing that the burden of the necessarily ultra-personal content and the required intimate impact of the story would lay solely on me and my willingness to speak unhesitatingly about my own sexual experiences. How else was I going to articulate the fully honest and sexually uncovering story I needed to tell?
If nothing else, I had always known that I must reveal as much personal and inter-personal sexual truth as I possibly could.
Fortunately, with the help of a bright minded multi-media artist that I met, I came to see that my most important store of content lay not only in the conglomeration of the sexual experiences that I’d had, but also in the wealth of conversant information I’d gathered from others, including the absolute most private kinds of personal anecdotes and intimate sexual histories.
In the novel Hypersexual, in chapter four the reader will come across the phrase:
“…I asked her my all time favorite question…when did you first have sex?”
This question, and several similar questions related to both the earliest sexual experiences of people as well as their more developed sexual experiences have passed through my lips and into the ears of my sex partners for the whole of my life. And my being so abundantly open about my own sexual history has enabled me to successfully liberate the usually guarded personal information of others, sometimes into openly flowing discourse, and sometimes into raging torrents of revelation and confession.
I’ve also asked these kinds of questions of perhaps as many as two hundred persons who were not my sexual partners, but who instead, for whatever their reasons, engaged in intimate conversation with me. And approximately fifty of those conversations were clinically approved interviews with people who knew ahead of time what kinds of questions I would be asking – but not exactly what questions. And I was often astonished by the released enthusiasm, even in those cooler and less secreted circumstances, of the willingly unleashed answers, admissions and declarations of my interviewees.
My deep and abiding interest in sex, sexual contact, and sexual issues has led me through a lifetime of informal research, and eventually into the formal research that went into the final stages of the preparation of this book.
However, until the day I carefully considered the possibility of writing my story in a fictional way, I hadn’t yet comprehended how effective that type of presentation would be for allowing me to include all the crucial kinds of sexual information and socially challenging storylines I would need.
Importantly, I also realized then how the content and research I would be including on the numerous sexual, social, legal, and clinical issues could be transformed directly into the fictional characters make-up, and the multiple threads of the story (rather than the blunt exemplifications and statistical weight of a non-fictional presentation). All of which neatly completed the overall strategy for the novel.
From there, within months, my trangressive protagonist/narrator, my main antagonistic character and conflict, and the predominating dynamics of my central storyline were all born.
In the Foreword, the readers will see the sentence:
“This is a fictional story overflowing with the truths of a great many people.”
Which is precisely accurate: In the novel Hypersexual the characters traits, attributes, and issues, as well as the sexual and social behaviors and actions that are portrayed are, at the same time, both fictional and true.
Coming Next: A continued explanation of the distinctive and genre bending ways in which the novel Hypersexual was constructed, including the use of the author’s name (a pseudonym) for the protagonist/narrator.
