Sexual Healing Interview

An Interview with Jill Nelson

To this point, you've made your reputation writing nonfiction. Why a novel?

I love writing nonfiction, but life is about challenges, and writing a novel has definitely been a challenge. This has been an opportunity for me to stretch myself as a writer in ways I haven't since college, when I wrote mainly fiction and thought journalism was something I'd do for a few years until I wrote a great African American novel. Fiction is also a way to reach a broader audience. Women read more fiction than nonfiction, and since I see my first audience as women, a novel was just the logical and exciting next step in my career.

What was the genesis of this particular story?

Several years ago in conversation, a friend was explaining to me why she'd "retired" from dating. Then she said, "What black women need is a brothel for women." Her words stuck in my mind, and I called her and told her I wanted to use her comment as the framework for a novel. That was fine with her, as long as I dedicated the book to her, which I have.

Acey and Lydia, my protagonists, are like so many women I know who are best friends. They're very different in some ways—Lydia's a hedonist while Acey's steeped in traditional notions about relationships—yet they are alike in their ambition, their sexual desires and needs, and their willingness to overcome fear and fight for what they believe in. And they are winners, which was very important to me; literature needs more smart, ambitious, sexy, wild women who don't get saddled and tamed.

How do you see this new book as building on your earlier titles?

My work is always about identity and empowerment, and I see Sexual Healing as part of that continuum. Many of the issues discussed in Volunteer Slavery and Straight, No Chaser are echoed in Sexual Healing in fictional form, particularly women's struggle to self-define and not be limited or oppressed by the expectations of others. I'm fascinated by the ways people go about unearthing, defining, and owning our true selves in what are often adverse conditions. Sexual Healing examines those themes, using both business and sexuality as prisms through which to look at issues of identity and ownership.

How do you think readers will react to the way you write about women's experience of sex? Some of the scenes in the book are very explicit.

I think women will recognize parts of themselves, their mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends, not to mention the men in their lives—from Daddy to their minister to their man—and say Amen. I think men will learn a lot about women's sexuality through this book, and that's always good. Some people may be scandalized, but that's OK, too. The truth is sometimes so surprising we are taken aback. That's cool, as long as we can move forward and see the value in what has been revealed. And I dare anyone to read Sexual Healing and not laugh out loud.

As for being explicit, the sex act itself is inherently explicit—or at least, good sex usually is. I wanted to write about women's sexual pleasure stripped down to its essence, and avoid the soft-focus, gauzy, style of writing about sex. Sexual Healing is about two women's efforts to own their selves, their business, and their sexuality. In order to write this story, I had to own all that stuff too, including the sex.

This meant I had to push the censors, both my own and those of the larger society, off my shoulders. The mandate of A Sister's Spa is to give women pleasure on their own terms, so it was important to be very clear about what women see as pleasurable. I read a great deal, talked to many women, remembered, experimented, and, yes, fantasized in order to write the explicit sections. I wanted those sections to be both a compelling read and physically arousing, to turn the reader on intellectually and physically.

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