What Happens When You Read Your Mother’s X-Rated Novel

A few years ago, a writer friend asked me if there was a specific book that I considered to be my literary Waterloo. Was there a book I had hoped to conquer but hadn’t been able to? While I have long planned to read Stendhal’s The Red and The Black and Dickens’ Bleak House , the book that immediately came to mind was short, breezy, and X-rated. A Hot Property is a mere 171 pages and was written by mother, Judy Feiffer. The book was published in 1973, when I was a shy nine-year-old figuring out how to handle my combative parents who had recently split up. A Hot Property was called “funny” and “raunchy” by New York Times book reviewer Anatole Broyard, who also noted that my mother had found new and inventive ways to write about sex: “Mrs. Feiffer manages, even at this late date, to introduce a few new wrinkles into the subject. To genital, oral and anal variations, she has added nasal.” My mother was writing about the mores of her time. She wasn’t endorsing, she was reflecting. Perhaps she was even skewering. I didn’t read this or any other review, nor did I ever crack open the book, when I was a child. I had assumed my mother had written a novel about real estate—after all the title was A Hot Property —until my high school boyfriend plucked it off the shelf one day and started reading select passages aloud. Passages like, “Ubango’s nose was grinding deeper. It pushed upward like a mole burrowing toward the sun. A moist, mucus fluid drained down her leg.” After my father left, my mother was anxious about money. While my father was providing child support, she clearly found the settlement they had agreed on to be insufficient. It was the early 1970’s and Jacqueline Susann had seduced millions of readers with her New York Times bestselling books Valley of the Dolls and The Love Machine . My mother must have thought she could be the next Jacqueline Susann. After all they were both smart, Jewish born beauties […]

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