Writing Sex: A Conversation with Garth Greenwell

There’s a passage in Garth Greenwell’s third novel, Small Rain, which stuck with me long after I put the book down. The narrator, a middle-aged poet, says that he is so ashamed by his physical appearance that he can’t “remember ever being shirtless outside”—the feeling of the sun on his chest is alien to him. “It’s been a surprise to me how little that scene has been commented on,” Garth told me, when we spoke; particularly because he thinks of it as “the most important scene” in the novel. Shame and embarrassment about our bodies are ordinary experiences. Yet, despite the primacy of the male perspective in literary fiction, honest depictions of the male body, and men’s emotional experiences about their physical appearance, are a rarity. There are still regions of lived masculine experience that writers, and readers, are reluctant to explore. 

Greenwell seems unafraid to do so. Such honesty, in fact, is foregrounded in his work: he writes about shame, disgust, and sexual hunger in a plainspoken, almost offhand manner that can shock and discomfit with its candor. Greenwell’s debut, What Belongs to You (2016), tells the story of an American man’s obsession with Mitko, a young male sex worker, and the various negotiations of power—financial, cultural, physical—this involves. Its setting is Sofia, Bulgaria, where the unnamed narrator teaches at the American College (Greenwell himself taught there for several years). After it is revealed that Mitko has syphilis, the narrator is forced to contend with memories of his childhood, where, raised under the surveillance of a domineering father, he was made to feel that his queer desires were concomitant with foulness, infirmity, and contagion. 

Greenwell’s sophomore novel, Cleanness (2020), is a spiritual sequel: a series of loosely connected vignettes in which the same narrator roams from classroom to club, anonymous hookups to public protests, searching for meaning after he has been ruined by love. The novel’s cast of ancillary characters are given privileged positions within the form: speech isn’t formatted as dialogue, but rather embedded within the narrator’s meandering, cumulative sentences, creating a hypnotic narrative rhythm in which his agency feels oddly diminished. The notion of agency—and the kinds of control, whether real or illusory, that men are wedded to—is probed further in a startling depiction of violent sadomasochistic gay sex, during which the narrator is physically and verbally abused, and the terms of consent gradually corrode.

Small Rain (2024), Greenwell’s newest novel, revisits the question of agency in a different sense. The same unnamed narrator, now repatriated to America, is in hospital suffering from excruciating and inexplicable pain. He finds himself at the whim of healthcare processes that are by turns arbitrary, opaque, and profoundly humane. In this incapacitated state, he looks inward, and variously contemplates the recursive nature of family trauma, the ordinary miracles of everyday life, and how love might become durable. The trio of novels establishes many of Greenwell’s recurrent interests as a writer: alienation, sexual lust, ho we all try and often fail to commune with one another. 

When I first read Garth’s fiction, nearly ten years ago, I was struck by the kinetic, conjectural quality of his narrator’s sentences, how they roam before suddenly stumbling on epiphanies about erotic and platonic love. The ways that men relate to one another—decoding these dynamics in order to reframe masculinity—is of intense interest to me as a writer, and so I was also eager to ask Garth about his depictions of violence and intimacy between men. 

I spoke with Garth in early June. He had just arrived in Madrid, to stay with his partner there. The connection was a little patchy—there was a delay—which didn’t facilitate easy dialogue. However, the heightened patience and attention required by us both made for an agreeable atmosphere to think through potentially volatile ideas of autonomy and constraint, a constant in our conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity. But we started with the most obvious (if not the most difficult) subject: we started with sex. 

Garth Greenwell: I do think logistics are sexy. I think that when you have a complicated action, or an action that is freighted with more than logistical meanings, then you can arrive at those greater meanings by actually doubling down on logistics. The whole game in writing, it seems to me, is to somehow find a way to arrange a finite number of data on the page in such a way that that finite number of data bears the weight, or gives the impression, of the infinite number of data that actually make up reality. Within the minuscule space that is even a long novel, how can one give a sense of the density of reality? I have a fundamentally phenomenological approach to that. Some of the most exciting passages of literature, for me, involve that logistical density. For example, when Zola describes how you lower a horse into a mine; or when Iris Murdoch describes dredging a medieval bell out of a lake; I really feel like I could replicate those actions. When sex writing isn’t successful, I find there’s often an attempt to leap across the logistics and arrive at a space of metaphysical amplitude.

I often say about writing sex that I want it both ways; I want to say the sex is this privileged activity that gives us access to all sorts of meanings, and that it is an especially dense form of communication. But also I want to say that writing sex is just like writing anything else, and being exact, and trying to actually put concrete sense data—physical information on the page—and that’s a huge part of the battle. 

I tend to lean into the idea that one can write from a position of actively experiencing desire. But that’s largely pushing against the moralistic accusation that if one were to, for example, turn oneself on while writing, that would somehow be masturbatory, in a way that hangs on to Victorian ideas about the moral status of masturbation. 

Actually, I’m pretty Horation about it. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” I think the same thing can happen with sexual desire, too, and that an experience of sexual desire or being turned on can be a very powerful part of any aesthetic experience. 

I think feeling desire oneself when one is constructing a scene animated by desire is potentially a sign that you are not writing badly. On the other hand, something to me that feels constitutive of the artist, is that no matter how overwhelming any feeling is, there is always some untouched territory of the self that is being a very ruthless observer and technician. When I’m writing, I would say desire plays a role. But not only my desire—also the desire of the sentence. 

That syntax itself is implicated in a kind of erotic impulse that is not exactly the same as my own erotic impulse. And that the pressure of the various kinds of traditions with which one is always in conversation with when one is making art; that, too, is a kind of force of desire, or an erotic force. I certainly feel like when I am writing anything, I am attempting to attune myself to a kind of impulse or energy that has more to do with desire than it does something like reason. In that regard, it makes sense to talk about writing as participating in the erotic. 

Absolutely not. I don’t think identity is a territory that can be privatized. I utterly reject as reactionary and conservative the whole idea of identity as something that is essential, as opposed to something that is performative. I also reject any model of the human that suggests that some demographic data point places a hard limit on our faculties of the imagination or our moral sympathy. I think trespass is a word that has no place in art. Smart discussions about this would think about the role of the market in art, and the ways in which we are constrained within a system in which to be loved means to be made a commodity. We are constrained to turn our personhoods into profit-making endeavors. And then there are un-smart conversations about appropriation that I think are fundamentally totalitarian: they want to place hard lines, to build walls and borders. Human beings are appropriative animals; what we do, how we learn, how we grow, how we love each other, involves inhabiting forms that we encounter in the world. Any philosophy or social theory that wants to legislate that is fundamentally anti-art and anti-human.

I think there are many beautiful things about that novel, but I don’t think it’s a successful inhabitation of a nineteen-year-old female voice. I think Tish sounds an awful lot like Baldwin. But to the extent that one sees this as a kind of failing, it’s not a moral failing on Baldwin’s part. It’s a technical failing, one that does not rob the book of other kinds of value that it has. The more we can talk about what seem to us [to be] failures of representation as technical failures, rather than moral failures, the better. Although I see the complications in this viewpoint, I do think there is an awful lot of value in insisting on a separation between the work of art and the artist. Especially after this period where it seems works of art have been reduced to evidence about the artist, I feel there’s a lot of value in recognizing the extent to which there is more at play in any work of art than just the artist’s subjectivity. 

I tend to feel a way similar to you: for one thing, we have theorized sex as an activity of great moral peril, a field of infinite vulnerability and therefore infinite opportunity for harm. I don’t think this is good for anybody. 

I think that’s right. We have scared ourselves about it. And I’m very excited by writers—who are often queer writers—who came of age as I did, in places where consent was important, but the terms of consent were not affirmative consent. I feel very protective of places that allow for sociality under other terms of consent.

That one can consent to enter a space that has different standards of consent, for example. Where sexual desire offers opportunities for a certain kind of education and discovery about oneself. In these spaces, one can learn a certain kind of resilience, and one can learn that bad sexual experiences are not necessarily forms of violence or harm. Affirmative consent as the only acceptable standard makes this more difficult. In a similar way that we feel experimenting with representing a subject position that is not my own might result in a kind of condemnation, so too we feel that through a certain kind of experimentation, sexually, one might condemn oneself absolutely. And that feels unfortunate to me, in art as in life. 

I have very visceral memories of writing “Gospodar.” It was the first piece of fiction I wrote after having returned to the U.S. after four years in Bulgaria. I had moved to Iowa to start an MFA program in fiction. I found that I needed to be in a public place to write that scene. I remember so clearly the table at the cafe where I would write it. It was a very intense experience of immersion, and I did feel like writing it was not an exemplary act of healthy self-care. “Gospodar” was the first chapter of Cleanness that I showed to anybody. It was a powerful experience to make it public. I felt so much defiance as I submitted it. You know: fuck these people, I thought, I don’t care what they think. And then I felt sick all weekend after I handed it in. 

The reason the book is called Cleanness is that I think the desire for cleanness is dangerous. On one hand, the desire for cleanness or purity can inspire great beauty and idealism, but it is also the impulse behind Sodom and Gomorrah, the city reduced to ash. Especially when it comes to something like homophobia, it seems to me obvious that, in the place I was born and grew up, homophobia was all there was to make a self out of. As I came to understand or experience my own queerness, there was nothing else. It wasn’t to somehow scrub myself clean and get rid of the homophobia and somehow find some pure, true, innocent version of myself “before” the homophobia. The goal is not to get rid of it but to do something with it: how do we take bad feelings, repressive forces, and somehow make them productive? 

It does seem to me that much of what I find invigorating in queerness and the traditions of queer art and politics is the way in which stigma is transformed. And that queer art has often been motivated by this incredible potential that art has to transform the progressive into the productive, so that stigma can be turned into style. 

I think of sadomasochism as a kind of aesthetic practice, in the sense that one draws a frame around something and separates it from the real world. And in that frame, actions, symbols, and words can be re-signified, and something that had been purely destructive or repressive can be made productive of pleasure and sociality, of something like love. 

It seemed to me that to try and say something adequate about the complexity of what can happen when two people come together in a kind of sexual sociality, I needed a scene in which that technology of transformation went wrong, and in which it went right. The truth I was trying to get at in “Gospodar” could not be got at in a single scene. I needed, as you say, a contrapuntal approach. To me, “The Little Saint” is the most important scene in the book. I intended it to be ironic, at first, but as I wrote it I came to know that it was entirely straight-faced—that the Little Saint performs a saint-like action. I was interested in a re-figuration of promiscuity—being a slut—as a radical form of hospitality.

The sex writing in Another Country is so remarkable because it’s so varied. I don’t think it’s all successful. It’s the first time he writes [about] explicit sex between men. There’s no explicit sex in Giovanni’s Room, which is something one forgets because that novel is so sexy. In the first explicit sex scene he writes between men, one of the characters, Vivaldo, is heterosexual, and the other, Eric, is plausibly bisexual. Eric has a relationship with Yves, who is pushed off stage for three hundred pages during which Eric has a heterosexual affair. And so there’s a kind of plausible straightness, a plausibly unimpeachable masculinity that feels very important to the energies of the sex scene between Eric and Vivaldo. It’s also radically unrealistic—that Vivaldo, who has never had sex with a man before, bottoms; and that there’s no mention of pain, or mess. Their bodies become unreal. 

On [the] one hand it’s very beautiful, and the emotional territory it lays claim to is beautiful. On the other hand I find it really unconvincing because the bodies disappear as plausible bodies. What is most important to me about Baldwin, he shows how writing intimate scenes between two bodies allows one to tackle the biggest questions about politics, intergenerational violence, and racism. 

It’s true that vulnerable descriptions of the male body are rare in the literature that I know. Two exceptions might be the great Edmund White, in what we will now think of as his last novels. Those novels are remarkable for their writing on the infirm, aged, male, still-desiring body, A Previous Life (2021) especially. The other great descriptions of the male body that I know of actually come from D. H. Lawrence. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which is full of really vulnerable descriptions of Mellors’ body.

My sense of agency is complicated by the sense that I don’t think we’re ever as free as we think we are. My fundamental human experience is ambivalence, and so there can seem to be a kind of paralysis, sometimes, in my narrator. In Small Rain, the paralysis becomes much more literal—the narrator is stuck in a hospital bed for two weeks—and so that book’s sense of the human is certainly different from the first two. The narrator is forced to realise, not only in his own particular case of medical crisis but also constitutive of the human, how utterly insignificant and minuscule our will is in the face of contingency and mortality. And that, actually, is at the heart of any meaningful definition of the human: our wills fundamentally do not matter because there is absolutely nothing we can do in the face of death. If there are three constitutionally true things about human beings it is that we are the animal that knows it will die; we’re the animal whose fulfilment comes from loving and being loved; we’re the animal that has to make meaning. Existing, for us, means making meaning out of existence. This is a very Baldwinian theme, actually. Something Baldwin spoke about throughout his career, and something that becomes a theme of Small Rain, is that the only durable meaning, the only non-destructive meaning we can make out of our existence is meaning that recognizes the fact of death.