[Read all of the articles in our Love/Sex issue HERE! Looking for a print copy? Look at this handy-dandy map!—eds.]

The writer Garth Greenwell once wrote about attending a lecture at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and hearing a writer say that an ideal sex scene would be a single sentence “they sat down on the sofa…” and then just white space. 

This is the most succinct example of the literary establishment’s bias towards sex. Does sex—all those squishy sounds, all those technical body parts slipping and sliding all over the place—really belong in capital "L" Literature? And yet, what is literature if not simply a lens through which we better understand our lives, our humanity? And, as Greenwell argues, how exactly can that be accomplished if that lens never turns its eye to our most primal act: sex.  

The end result may not be white space, but it’s not much better. Sex in modern literature is often an air-brushed version of human sexuality far-removed from any kind of embodied experience. Nobody gets a hip cramp. Nobody has ingrown hair. Nobody actually seems to have a body, but instead just a brain, which takes a short break from musing on class and gender and capitalism, to have sexual intercourse, described with similar levels of detachment and intellectual flourishes. 

Enter Lidia Yuknavitch’s new book, Reading the Waves. The Oregon author’s first work of nonfiction since her viral memoir, Chronology of Water, Reading the Waves is a collection of essays spanning various topics and times of Yuknavitch’s life—a troubled family history, past sexual relationships, her son growing up and leaving home, the death of her second husband, Devin, her experience post-menopause. The thread that ties all of this together, that works both as framework and jumping off point, as subtext and as story, is the body. In all its slippery squishy glory. 

Sex à la Yuknavitch is not written as a taut and detached experience to be analyzed, it is written on the body, by the body. Take for example, this description of Yuknavitch in the bath: 

“My pleasure. The pleasure of a woman whose children—one who died, one who grew—are gone, a woman whose blood has come back to her forever. I put my hand to the other mouth of me there in the water. I parted the lips of a self. With one finger two fingers I entered myself, the cave of my being, the lifedeath space. With my heavy wing hand, I pounded my clit. The water became waves. My body the waves. My eyes were closed but I recognized the heat surge of my ‘I’ rising in my hips and cunt.”

This is where I must caveat that if you, like the writer that Greenwell mentions, would prefer to have sex be just white space on a page, Reading the Waves may not be the book for you. In fact, this may not even be the book review for you. But if you have the appetite for Yuknavitch’s particular brand of candid lucidity, read on. 

What Yuknavitch offers us, with such deft sleight of hand it almost seems unintentional, is the deconstruction of the sex scene. Sex does not occur in a contained two-page erotic tableau. No, sex occurs alongside loss, grief, body aches, aging, and sitting in a bath because you’re too afraid to be home to witness your child leaving for college. It becomes as ordinary as mustard and as rapturous as a spiritual experience. 

“Joy resists narration,” Yuknavitch writes. And yet the thing I didn’t know I was longing for, until I read it, was her narration of just that: joy—especially as it relates to sexuality. Most sexual encounters I read in books this year were tinged with shame or deception, or questionable levels of consent. Given our political climate, this portrayal of sexuality is all too common, but I was surprised at how refreshing it felt to read Yukanvitch’s emphasis on the joy of bodily function. For example: “She put her mouth to each of my nipples so that they shot up like they were screaming for the stars to take them back…I halfway wanted someone to pull my legs apart so hard I snapped like a wishbone.” I mean, fuck yeah. 

This isn’t to say that Yuknavitch is somehow putting a pretty face on human sexuality. Incest, molestation, violence against women, coercion, all of these topics exist under Yukanvitch’s disarmingly frank gaze. 

As a child, she struggles to masturbate after her cousin is brutally murdered. Her poet boyfriend punches her in the face and then attempts to seduce her by revealing that he is wearing a pair of her own black lace underwear. Reading this scene, I braced myself for an ending that 4B feminists like myself would deem appropriate. Surely, Yuknavitch will scold him for being an abuser and demand back her lacy drawers. But no, she doesn’t. “It was a nightmare except that it was also funny as shit,” she writes. “A woman like me couldn’t bring myself to humiliate a poet in his moment of repentance. Not with those panties.” 

Have I ever felt more seen in a piece of writing about coercion and toxic masculinity and shame and guilt? “Do you kind of hate men?” her son asks her, years later. “Sometimes I do,” she replies. “Or maybe I hate something in myself I can’t figure out.” 

Again and again, Yuknavitch reminds us that there’s no thing that is just one thing. Everything is connected. “I believe sexuality is omnipresent and takes a million forms,” Yuknavitch writes, “some tiny as molecules, others epic as myths. So this story is either about a ‘hike’ or about sexuality.” 

As we snap 2025 open like a wishbone, as tradwives bake and incels rage and porn keeps porning, it seems at times almost impossible to separate the reality of sex from the fantasy of it, like an image you stare at long and hard, trying to determine if it’s AI or not. Yuknavitch won’t make you wonder: In this revealing and multi-faceted look at death, living, and the multitudes of the body, she writes against the fantasy. She writes the truth about sex, which, it turns out, is the sexiest thing of all.


Lidia Yuknavitch appears in conversation with Rene Denfeld at Powell's City of Books, 1001 W Burnside, Tues Feb 4, 7 pm, FREE