Sex, love, true crime, and the Apostle Paul
on loving new things
Last night I sat on stage at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop with two other authors and talked about love.
To my left sat literary phenom Melissa Febos, who read from her recent book The Dry Season; a Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. To my right sat Sarah Gerard, who read from Carrie, Caroline, Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable.
I, of course, read a short sermon on 1 Corinthians 13.
Sex, love, true crime, and the Apostle Paul.
A pretty good Saturday night.
“She taught me to love dry shampoo,” was a line that stayed with me from Sarah’s reading. She’d spent six years interviewing people who knew her friend Carrie, and I loved that she included this small, intimate detail of influence. On stage I asked her about it.
Maybe because the night before, I’d hosted a dinner for Melissa (whom I’ve known since I was her middle-school camp counselor in the early ’90s), and while giving her a tour of the house I pointed to a Nicki McClure print in our bathroom and said, “You’re actually the one who turned me onto this artist. I saw her prints in your Brooklyn apartment like twelve years ago and came home and bought one.”
Sometimes we discover new things to appreciate because love is transmitted to us through other people.
I’m not sure I loved the Psalms much until I sat in a classroom with a professor who loved them. Watching what it looked like to LOVE — like, really love — the Psalms made me want to love them too. And now I do.
This is how most of the things I now love entered my life: Nick Drake, green olives, Sacred Harp singing, Schitt’s Creek, dogs, tattoos.
They all came to me through someone else’s affection for them.
Which brings me to football.
At the end of the panel discussion last night, Melissa asked Sarah and me what we are loving right now.
“NFL football,” I said.
Anyone who knows me will tell you that until a few months ago I had zero interest in sports. But in late October, a few days after my surgery, when I was still basically living in a recliner, Eric was clicking through channels trying to find something we could both watch and realized the Broncos were playing.
“A Broncos game is perfect,” I assured him. “I love sleeping to sports!”
But the thing is — I didn’t sleep. I watched. And man, did I have questions, which as a lifelong Broncos fan, Eric was delighted to answer. By the end of the game I was yelling at the TV, which felt great because after a double mastectomy I really needed to yell at something.
