Dear fans of erotica and romance, today we have a very special interview for you:

Pam Rosenthal, a.k.a. Molly Weatherfield – PART ONE – Carrie’s Story

 Pam/Molly is an award winning author in both the genres of romance and erotica! That  doesn’t happen to just anybody! I had just finished reading her first published erotica novel, Carrie’s Story, and I felt such a kinship with both the titular character and the author. I looked her up, reached out, and – to my great luck – she was willing to chat! Then she was willing to do an interview. Now, if you haven’t heard of her (and, I admit, I had only heard of her in passing about a year ago), you totally should have! Why? Because her writing – style, plot, characters, and basic command of the English language – put that other ho-hum popularizer of erotica/BDSM fiction to shame! That’s right, 50 Shades should have been called “50 Degrees Not-As-Good-As Molly Weatherfield!” Or maybe, “16 Years Late!” No, really! Anything that pale best seller had to offer was there in Carrie’s Story, and more – whoa so much more! Don’t take my word for it. Read both for yourselves and get back to me.

Luckily, some have seen the quality in Molly/Pam. In October of 2006, Playboy called Carrie’s Story one of the top 25 sexiest novels ever written! Number 12, in fact – just after Lolita (which, in HH’s humble opinion is the best erotica ever written) and just before Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Not too shabby!

Playboy’s 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written

Number 12 – Top 50 Percentile

That’s not the only list she’s made. There’s also “33 of the Best Erotic Novels of All Time.” Now, if you read that list, you’ll see that it is hardly “of all time.” I mean, there’s nothing prior to Lady Chatterley’s Lover from 1929 on the list. But hey, “33 of the Best Relatively Recent Erotic Novels” just doesn’t have the same pizazz.

Speaking of lists, one particular author I know (in a Biblical way) made the list of ranker.com‘s “Best Sensual Fiction Writers” (even though HH isn’t writing “fiction”). We’d both appreciate it if you’d take a moment to vote us up on the list. Thanks!

Classic and Updated

Now, let’s get to the interview!

Carrie’s Story (updated cover)

Lola – OMG! It is such an honor to interview you! However, I have to be honest, so far I have only read your BDSM erotic novel, Carrie’s Story.  That’s why this interview is PART ONE.  I look forward to reading Safe Word and then having a second interview. And, maybe, when I can, reading some of your Romance work, like A House East of Regent Street, which you published under your own name, Pam Rosenthal. But tell me, what’s your background?  How did you get into writing?

Molly – I’ve always thought of myself as a lifelong English major, in love with reading and writing, and a little shaky in terms of earnings potential. For most of my life I managed to pay the bills as a computer programmer, which was hard, though also stimulating, pretending to have technical chops. Before Carrie, I never considered writing fiction; what writing I did was lit-crit or wonky nonfiction stuff, often about computers and science fiction, published in obscure leftwing venues, but pretty exciting to me intellectually and even artistically (I got the name Molly, for example, from the mirror-shades girl in the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer).

I’ve also been a feminist since I came to adulthood in the late 60s (I’m pretty old, as anybody who did the math can figure out). And I also had a secret passion for SM erotica, at least since high school when I somehow glommed onto the Marquis de Sade. Which two parts of my belief system weren’t easy to reconcile, especially since 60s-70s second-wave feminism was particularly disapproving of anything smacking of sexual “objectification.” 

But it was my great good fortune to be in the right place at the right time to begin to resolve my dilemmas. I don’t know if your readers will know this history, but in the early 1980s there was a big split among feminists called “the sex wars,” where some devastatingly brilliant women began to challenge feminist orthodoxy, and to insist that their erotic and affective lives, their role-playing, style of dress, (even their lipstick) didn’t invalidate their personal power. This might sound quaint to you, but for me it was huge when feminists started theorizing about sexuality, writing erotica, plumbing the boundaries of autonomy and desire. There was a lot of backlash; a friend, the late Amber Hollibaugh, was thrown off a panel at Barnard College for talking about butch/femme lesbian roles. But I was inspired, and had the good luck to meet legends like Susie Bright and many others, and to read great, smart erotic stuff — fiction and non-fiction both, which probably got my writing instincts going, though I didn’t know it yet.  

Lola – Carrie’s Story is. . . how should I say?  It pushes so many limits.  How did you hit on this story?  Did the character of Carrie come to you first or did the deep, dark adventures just unfold as you went along?  What was the creative process?

Molly – I remember the first time I tried to write an SM story. It was a lazy, sunny Sunday after sex, and I was feeling really good and loosey-goosey, which I guess freed up my thoughts in some way. So, when my mind drifted to SM fantasies — and then to the fears of fascism that sometimes also flowed in along with the sexual stuff — I felt a little braver than usual, a little less guilty and a little more adventurous. Maybe sex-positive feminist thinking had actually started to penetrate; in any case, I began to wonder whether I was really the sicko I feared I was. What would happen, I wondered, if I actually let the fantasies rip? What would they look like if I wrote them down (what a concept)? So I sat down to find out.

For hours. There I sat in my ratty pink terrycloth bathrobe, scribbling and smiling and just… happy. I totally didn’t know what I was doing — I even had to run to the bookshelf to see how to punctuate dialogue. And when I wrote COMMA CLOSE QUOTE HE SAID PERIOD, I felt like God.

The story stank, though it did have a character sort of like Jonathan and a few characters who found their way into Safe Word. But it was such fun, and I felt so much myself, that I was determined to keep writing, and maybe even trust my own moral sense. Because I found that in my fantasies, I was totally turned on — obsessed really — by the idea of mutual consent, and the subtle, interesting places that can take the imagination and the relationship. I’m interested in people playing power games, exploring strange places, but from a position of mutual agreement as to the boundaries of the fantasy space. I am absolutely not interested in sex where deep down (in like reality, like in government or the economy, or like on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island) the power is unequal. 

What was missing, of course, was Carrie. The smart-girl voice who’d been in my head since Jo March, and in western fiction since Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre. The brave girl who fights the power with words and wit, and who can own the experience through her smarts. I realized I needed her to tell the story I was evidently dreaming up when I “heard” that voice in a fantasy novel called Beauty, by Sheri S. Tepper.

Anyhow, once I realized that Carrie would be telling the story, and that it was a story — that is, that she feels a need to tell us how she got to where she is when she’s telling it (which we don’t know yet, except for the auction, but which suggests a lot of SM tropes), I felt like I was cleared to go. That compulsion to tell how you got where you are is a powerful narrative engine, and I began to see how you could apply this to BDSM, with its tropes of training and discipline. Even if I didn’t know the ending, I felt that it would emerge in the telling. And oddly, the first publisher, Masquerade Books, caught the mood perfectly with the cover of the first edition: something about those wide light eyes, those parted lips (other Masquerade editions went way downhill from there).

Carrie’s Story – Original Masquerade Publishing Cover

Carrie’s Story, Most Recent (and Tame) Cover

Lola – You published this in ʼ94, so you must have been writing it earlier than that. Just to be clear – that was well before 50 Shades of Grey and its imitators took BDSM into the mainstream. Were you scared by what you had written? Did you think you’d ever find a publisher for it, or an audience? What was it like to be writing this stuff at that time?

Molly – I probably started writing it in ʼ91 or so. I was in no hurry, because it felt like its own reward to be exploring my fantasy life, opening up my imagination and sharing it with my husband, who began to share his as well. I don’t usually think of myself as brave, but I did while I was writing, and that felt amazing. And yeah, sure I was scared. “Always scared,” as Carrie says at some point. Because isn’t that what bravery is, to be willing to go where it’s scary? Isn’t that how we always get where we’re going, to find our limits as we go?

Still, I wasn’t writing in a vacuum. I was breathing the air of the San Francisco sex-positive feminist community, standing on the shoulders of giants, if you will. I was playing catch-up, reading lots of erotic fiction and theory, and adding a lot of stuff from my own reading over the years. And of course, since Carrie’s a brilliant, prodigy student intellectual, it all kind of fit together for me. 

As to whether I’d find a publisher: at first I really had no idea whether the thing was publishable. I thought the writing was good; I have a fair amount of confidence in my voice. But I didn’t know if my particular take on how body and mind work together would resonate with anybody else — and of course there’s always the fear of revealing oneself and grossing people out. “It’s a pure act,” I kept telling myself. “It’s its own reward.” And — certainly compared to Fifty Shades of Grey — the Carrie books are clearly a niche taste. But as the years go by, and as still, after 30 years, every so often I open my email to read some absolutely amazing, deeply thought communication from one or another reader, the thrill of making connection never gets old.

Carrie’s Story as I imagine it

Lola – The book, and its smart, sensual, and masochistic titular main character make frequent reference to erotica classics, most notably, Story of O by Pauline Réage.  What were the books that influenced you the most in writing this one and why?

Adaptation of Story of O

Molly – I’ve already mentioned the Marquis de Sade, who was in many ways a dreadful person, but I read bits and pieces when I was a teenager, and it stayed with me. A couple of years after that I read Susan Sontag’s essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” and she talked about how porn is often funny, which gave me permission, years later, to make Carrie funny. Anyway, Sade is funny, in a weird, cold, whacked-out way (for more on this, for anybody who’s curious, you can read the piece I wrote for Salon.com, which is still kicking around the internet at https://www.salon.com/1998/11/19/feature_459/).

Histoire d Lo

Then, of course, Story of O, which came out in English in 1966, the same summer as Bob Dylan’s record Blonde on Blonde, which was the summer I connected with the guy I’ve been married to for more than 50 years now. We passed his copy of Story of O back and forth in bed. (And many years later I wrote about it, also for Salon, https://www.salon.com/1998/08/06/feature_12/)

Blonde on Blonde?

The next, important books came years later: Gayle Rubin, the brilliant queer theorist and cultural anthropologist, recommended Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty books, and I ran-not-walked to get hold of them. I think I’d find them unreadable now (all that spanking!), but at the time, I just gobbled them up, because I loved the equal-opportunity sexuality (women as tops and bottoms; gay and straight combinations cheerfully intermingling). And I loved the Disneyland fairy-tale setting. It was so light-hearted, so technicolor: I was totally energized by the idea of this sexual magic kingdom. 

Sleeping Beauty

There were also small-press books written by local (often queer) authors, that were super hot. Pat (now Patrick) Califia, Aaron Travis, Carol Queen, Thomas Roche, and Simon Sheppard are names that spring to mind, but there were lots more: San Francisco in the 80s and 90s was bursting with creative erotic imagination; I met Tristan Taormino at an open mic, for example. And this week I went to a Zoom memorial for the recently-deceased Dorothy Freed, a stalwart at erotic writers groups, whose memoir of her longtime, loving marriage to her BDSM partner, Life After Promiscuity, I totally recommend (I copy-edited it).

Perfect Strangers by Dorothy Freed

Lola – Though the story-line is fanciful, many of the scenes are ones that could have a basis in reality.  Were any of the sexy scenarios drawn from your real-life experience?

Molly – No. Sorry. My real-life experience is much more about subtle signals and shared imaginings. A funny thing, though, is that some people I used to work with as a programmer are sure they know who I took as my model for Carrie — and they won’t tell me who!

Porn inspired by Carrie’s Story

Lola – Did you dare show the novel to any of your friends, lovers, or family when it was still in manuscript form?  If so, how did they react?  And how did they react when it got published?

Molly – I’ve always been ridiculously, naively open about this stuff. There were some people who totally didn’t get it, but in general I received remarkably little pushback, and incredible help from friends who agreed to be beta readers, including the guy who corrected a quote from the Latin somewhere. My husband, in particular, is a tough, brilliant editor who pulls no punches and always helps me improve whatever I write. I even came out to my mother about it (a long story how that happened), though I strenuously warned her not to read the stuff. But when a piece of Safe Word got into some iteration of Best American Erotica, of course she read it anyway – the word “best” just being too much for her. “What did you think?” I asked her somewhat grimly. “It was Very. Well. Written,” she replied, through a jaw that might have been wired shut. And that was that.

Lola in her collar

Lola – Before this interview, you told me that the story never got optioned by any film companies.  It’s so cinematographic.  I could totally picture everything in my mind.  I am surprised no one offered that to you, especially after the box-office killing that the ho-hum 50 Shades pulled in. Any ideas why not?

Carrie’s Story definitely inspired many movies

Molly – I’m so flattered you think that, and I do think that one of the things I do well is move characters through imagined space. But as for actually making a movie out of it… maybe it’s better that nobody has. Carrie goes through a lot of stuff that would be far less engaging if you had to look at it rather than imagine it as told through her smart-ass commentary. Or as a leatherman friend once said to me, “Pam, pain hurts!”

Pain Hurts, but degradation?

Lola –  I’m sorry for the comparison and any spoilers, but, it seems to me the whole boring premise of 50 Shades is “Will she or won’t she?” sign the contract, that is. In Carrie’s Story, there is a contract, but the joke is that it’s all just cosplay, though the pain, degradation, abasement, and humiliation are real. However, Carrie can say no at any time. As I read it, I found it interesting to wonder, “How far will she go?” And it seemed to me like this was Carrie’s question too: “How far will I go?” And she goes pretty damn far! How did the plot drive the novel for you?

Molly – I think you’ve intuited what I’m going to answer. That the energy that makes the plot go was my energy, my curiosity about how far my fantasy life would go. You can’t fake that energy — or at least I can’t.

Lola – I was so glad to learn that there was a sequel because, if I have any criticism of the book, it’s that it ended prematurely.  I wanted it to go on – so badly!  Just like I want this interview to go on.  I guess I have to get reading.  But, quick question, the audio book, narrated by Shana Savage, is just fantastic! Were you involved in choosing her for that format?

The only way to fly is listening to erotica

Molly – I was involved, and it is fantastic. Susie Bright, who produced the audio, let me choose between 3 finalists, and I chose Shana. And I’m so proud that in 2014 the audio book won an Audie award for best erotica — first time they gave an award for erotica.

Eargasms

Lola – Thanks again! We will continue this soon, I hope!!!!

Molly – Thank you, and hope to speak again.

Pam Rosenthal/Molly Weatherfield