I am a historian of sexuality who is fascinated by unknown stories that reveal the past to be way more complicated than we expect. I’ve written about same-sex marriage in early America, a teenage female poet of the American Revolution, a masculine woman who founded her own college, and a notorious British pederast. Now I’m working on the tale of a forgotten American sexual adventuress and jewel thief. I also have a longstanding research project about the history of food and sex from the eighteenth century to the present day.
I wrote...
Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality
By
Rachel Hope Cleves
What is my book about?
The life of the writer Norman Douglas presents an impossible paradox: how could a man who was well known during his own lifetime for his sexual obsession with children have been so beloved by famous authors like D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Nancy Cunard, as well as by countless readers on both sides of the Atlantic? Answering that question puts the biographer (me) in an impossible situation, as I trace the social history of pederasty and discover that attitudes towards sex between men and children were far more accommodating in the first half of the twentieth century than they are now. Unspeakable is not just a sexual biography of a man who would now be considered a monster, it’s a reflection on how historians of sexuality can write about practices that are more taboo today than they were in the past.
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Quest for Corvo
By
A. J. A. Symons
Why this book?
Before Symons published The Quest for Corvo in 1934, many biographies were little more than hagiographies, or boring tomes about unblemished saints. Symons redefined biography by writing a mystery story, featuring himself as a historical detective seeking to understand how a character as disagreeable as Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a. Baron Corvo, could have authored beautiful novels like Hadrian the Seventh.
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Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence
By
Geoff Dyer
Why this book?
A funnier book has never been written about the anxieties and frustrations of a would-be biographer. Dyer’s memoir of his misadventures traveling around Sicily, New Mexico, and Britain while not writing the biography of D. H. Lawrence, is a hilarious and totally relatable tale of failure.
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The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
By
Janet Malcolm
Why this book?
In my secret heart of hearts, I wrote my most recent book, Unspeakable, for an audience of one: Janet Malcolm. All her prose is sharp, but her anti-biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is spectacular in its exploration of the question: is it even possible to write a truthful biography?
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All We Know: Three Lives
By
Lisa Cohen
Why this book?
Through sheer magic, Lisa Cohen manages to combine three lives that defy biography into a beautifully written group portrait of mid-century lesbian modernism. Although Cohen writes that “every biography is a disappointment of some kind,” her book about Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland thrilled me from start to finish.
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
By
Saidiya V. Hartman
Why this book?
The violence of the archives challenges the retelling of the lives of Black women, whose voices were rarely judged worthy of preservation by white society. Hartman makes art of the traces of the radical lives of Black women at the turn of the twentieth century, bringing her literary imagination to break open the archival traces her subjects left behind.
