The first grown-up novel I ever read was Debbie Does Dallas. I was 13 years old.
I found it on a bookshelf, squished between my father’s Louis L’Amour books; the neon pink spine stood out like a giraffe at an alligator convention. Of course I didn’t know it was porn in the beginning and by the time I did figure it out……well…..there’s no easy way of confronting your father with it because his first question is going to be “How do you know it’s porn?!” And his second question would be “Did you learn anything?” which terrified me so I kept it to myself.
The whole point of Debbie Does Dallas, to 13 year old me, was that it wasn’t the sterile, watered down version of life that Children’s Classics portrayed. No one slipped and fell on a penis in Black Beauty. Those Little Women never once discussed their vaginas or orgasms. The Wizard of Oz never sold crack to Dorothy and there was no pay-by-the-hour motel in Call of the Wild.
Admittedly, there are more gentle ways to learn about the sexual side of life that won’t leave your eyeballs drying out from lack of blinking and make you question what your parents are up to behind their closed bedroom door. I could have done without that.
The ultimate lesson learned from DDD is that book characters are not always the sweet, kind, thoughtful, boring people who inhabit Children’s books and I wanted to meet more of them. In a way, I blasted out of children’s literature like I’d been fired from a cannon.
And then High School Literature happened and nearly turned me off books completely. The novel choices were terrible and they taught my generation nothing more than to drive to the nearest book store and buy the Coles Notes version that we could read in 2 hours. The only thing that kept me going was Debbie Doing Dallas.
I’ve read my way around the block more than just a few times; I’ve come across wonderful authors and truly great stories. I’ll share rousing, cursing, bloody novels and pee-your-pants laughing novels and I-cried-at-the-end novels and novels that pissed me off and novels that changed the way I look at the world.
And if we’re honest with ourselves, we all know that what I get out of a novel probably isn’t the same thing that other people would get out of it.
I’m working on my first author as you read this. I’ll give you a hint: it’s about cursing, farting, screwing, bloody, beard-growing Vikings that you’ll fall in love with.
Trust me.
You will.
