Passion & pain
For Alicia Erian, it's the dark side of sex that is the most intriguing
WELLESLEY -- Few subjects are more of a tightrope-walk for the fiction writer than sexual molestation of a child. It's all so intense, emotional, easy to get wrong, and hard to write about without offending or repulsing someone. That was the challenge Alicia Erian, 37, undertook with her first novel, ''Towelhead."
The book includes graphic depictions of sex involving a 13-year-old girl, scenes some readers might find disturbing. ''It makes people feel like a pervert," Erian said, ''but I think that's my job."
Her actual job is teaching creative writing at Wellesley College, but her work is writing stories, many of which lay bare the raw feelings, along with the details, of sex. ''I really like writing about sex, a lot," she said in an interview in her campus office. ''Sex in life. Most of the adults I know think a lot about sex -- it colors the decisions they make and the things they say. Sex is often roped off in fiction. Here is this main stage, and the characters go behind this rope and have sex, and then they come back and they're in real life. And I really like integrating it."
What she writes is far from erotica. It's more about the way people behave, sexually, when they are suffering or needy, often without fully knowing it. For most of the young characters in the nine stories of her 2001 collection, ''The Brutal Language of Love," sexual behaviors are signposts of other heartaches or emptiness.
In ''Towelhead," Erian's first novel, a 13-year-old daughter of divorced parents is sent by her mother, who has a new boyfriend much too interested in the blossoming girl, to live with the girl's Lebanese-American father in Houston. Jasira's schoolmates taunt her with anti-Arab slurs, including ''towelhead." Her father, a petty tyrant, is cold and painfully dense and moralistic. He orders the girl to stop seeing her boyfriend, Thomas, because he is black, but he's oblivious to the attention she is getting from the married man next door.
Most writers dismiss any connection between their characters and themselves, but Erian said, ''Jasira is largely me, or some part of me." And the basic situation is inspired by her own experience, at age 11, of being sent, with her younger brother, to live with their father in Houston. ''We stayed for seven months," she said, ''and it was a disaster. My mother came back and got us." She was never molested, she said, but ''my thought was, I could write a novel about what might have happened if we had stayed."
Persuasion pays offErian is tall and animated, not eager to be photographed, but forthright about her life, thoughts, and feelings. She grew up near Syracuse, N.Y. A mediocre student, she had to go to community college -- ''to get my grades up" -- before entering the State University of New York at Binghamton.
''I looked at all those classes on the listing and said, 'Well, I can't do those things, I'll fail at those,' " she said. ''Then I thought, creative writing, that sounds easy. I can probably sucker someone into giving me a good grade for that." She graduated in 1989 with a degree in English, spent a year in England and Ireland, then applied to graduate school at the University of Texas. Certain she would be accepted, she moved to Austin to await her letter. But she didn't get in. ''I was stupid," she said.
She stayed in Austin. ''I worked in a grocery store and movie theater, where I became a projectionist. That was a good job. I could write in the projection booth while I was running the movies. I met my soon-to-be-ex-husband." She married David Franklin in 1995, and lived for a while in Florida, where she taught writing at the University of Central Florida. She earned a master's in creative writing from Vermont College. In 1998, she and Franklin moved to New York, where they lived until they separated in 2003. She speaks sadly of the breakup. ''He edited this whole book," she said, ''almost daily. It's very sad. It just didn't work out." She hopes to marry again, and to have children.
Erian had published stories in various magazines, and in 2000 sent a collection to New York literary agent Peter Steinberg. They were in a pile of unsolicited manuscripts, Steinberg said, and he noticed them only because the writer's address was a block from his in Brooklyn.
''I opened the envelope, read them, and thought, 'These are the best stories I've ever read,' " he said. He called her, and soon sold the collection to Villard, a division of Random House. She was delighted, but he recalls her saying, ''Peter, I will never write a novel." Though he didn't argue, he says now, ''I was so blown away by the stories, I thought, 'She has to do a novel.' " Eventually he talked her into it.
''Oh God, I didn't want to write it," she said. ''Too hard. Look at all those pages! It's really hard. Short stories I can whip out -- you can sort of gloss over characterization -- but in a novel, you're committed, you have to stick with your characters like glue, you're shadowing these people for three years." She did stick with them and finished the book, and Steinberg sold it to Simon & Schuster. ''Towelhead" has also been optioned for a movie by producer Alan Ball, whose credits include ''American Beauty" and the HBO series ''Six Feet Under."
Setting an exampleWithout reading her books, but only hearing some of her self-deprecating comments, one might not take Erian for a serious writer. But when she talks about writing, a sense of discipline and hard-won professionalism appears. She has firm views on what constitutes good and bad writing. She's tough on her students at Wellesley, too, where she's in the first year of a three-year appointment.
''I work them hard," she said. ''I only have them for three or four months, and I want them to write in a certain way. After that, they can do what they want, but I want them to learn structure and all the hardest things. They sometimes want to focus on language, but the hardest thing is, 'How do I build something?' "
In ''Towelhead," Jasira narrates her experiences in excruciating, fine-grained detail, as a kid would relate them. To complicate things, her adolescent hormones are surging, and she is racked with physical desire, desperate loneliness, and guilt. She knows she's being used, yet she wants to be pushed, to be told what to do, and Erian said some readers ''have complained that she doesn't stand up for herself more."
Erian is ''not afraid of the icky, of the underbelly," said her friend Nina de Gramont, who is also a short-story writer. ''She accepts it and explores it. She exposes people as borderline evil, then turns around and forgives them in a way that is very human." It would have been easy to make Mr. Vuoso, the molester, a clear-cut monster. But Erian said, ''I don't allow my students to write absolute good and evil characters, and I have to set an example. I love my characters, even Mr. Vuoso. He does bad things, but he also protects Jasira sometimes."
It's not the sex in ''Towelhead" that's unsettling, but the girl's emotional isolation between the battling parents. ''Emotional abuse is the worst thing," Erian said. ''It's the low hum of distress. If someone just beats the crap out of you, that is high-intensity and obviously bad. But if you are in a situation where things are always sort of bad, and it doesn't let up, that is the stuff that gives you problems as an adult. That is the stuff that sends Jasira to the guy next door, and that is why it's alarming."
Erian's themes can startle even those with a pretty high threshold. Her unfinished new novel has a male character with a strong sex drive who pushes his girlfriend, Audrey, to do things she's uncomfortable doing. Steinberg, Erian's agent, tried to sell an excerpt to Playboy, but the magazine turned it down. Erian said, ''They thought it was too racy."
In the end, Penthouse bought the excerpt (it has not yet appeared), even though Erian said the magazine's fiction editor ''had some of the same issues. This character, Audrey, lets this guy push her around, and they didn't want to seem approving of that." They overcame their scruples, however.
''It's absolutely thrilling to me," Erian said, ''because I'm a girl and I'm going to be in Penthouse, with my clothes on. I want to play with the big boys, you know? I want to have a manly career, go the route that men go. I don't want it to be that women can't have intensity about sex and have these ideas. It's not just the territory of men."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 