For the world’s benefit, Adrian Colesberry has released a guide to… having sex with Adrian Colesberry. His book, How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry, is a hilarious take on the relationship memoir filled with charts, graphs and lurid details about his sexual past and preferences. 
Adrian was kind enough to answer a few of my questions for the BookPeople blog. He will be in-store on October 8th at 7PM.
BP: What was the original impetus for the book? Did you intend to create a new style of relationship memoir, or were you just trying to make people laugh? AC: I began to work out this material in my stand-up act, so the book was always going to be funny, but I did very consciously set out to write a different kind of memoir, one where sex wasn’t used as a metaphor for another part of life, wasn’t something that the main character had to get over or get out of his or her system before growing up, but was treated as a deep life issue on its own. Sex is just as deep a part of our lives as family and friendship and love and spirituality. The way sex is maligned in the general culture, as a sin or a disease vector or an act of violence, is at the very least ungrateful for something most people experience as the most pleasant part of a life that is indeed all too “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
BP: There’s a lot of charts and graphs in the book. I’ve been told you attended the UT school of engineering in Austin. Did your education at UT help you in creating this book? AC: Undoubtedly, those pages contain the fruits of one entire year of UT engineering statistics. If I remembered my professor’s name, I’d give him some mad props.
BP: What has been the reaction to your book by people who are not intended to make love to Adrian Colesberry (like parents, extended family)? Obviously, there’s a lot of your personal sexual history in here. Has it made discussing your success with family members a little awkward? AC: Practically every time I talk to my mother (who is wonderfully supportive), she encourages me to write a “nice book” next, meaning not another book about sex. A couple of months ago, she called because papa had this great book idea he wanted to pitch me: “When people visit California on vacation, they don’t know what to do. You live in California, so you could write a book telling them secret places to go.” I said that it was a great idea, which it is. It’s such a great idea that there’s an entire area of Book People devoted to it. They’re both bright, well educated people, who know about the existence of travel books. That’s how much you torture your parents when you write such a dirty book: They develop the delusion that they’ve invented the very idea of travel books. Sorry mama, sorry papa. 
BP: Do you think Americans are generally more reticent to discuss frank sexual matters than people from other countries? AC: It is very true that we lack a healthy sexual dialogue in America. Our national discourse on sex is frantic and disturbed compared to other societies where it’s talked about with a great deal more balance. Americans do yak about sex a lot, but most of the noise centers around transgressive and violent sex. (Nothing makes a better day in the nation’s newsrooms than a rape or a child molestation. Americans seem not to be able to hear enough about that stuff, which is flat disturbing.) Most of what passes for positive dialogue in this country comes from an army of experts who medicalize and psychologize sex to within an inch of its life. Truth is, sex is an activity so varied and enjoyed in so many different ways that all one might be able to do is describe it for oneself, so the title of my book.
BP: You volunteer at public schools in LA teaching sex-ed. Do you think that the sexual knowledge of young Americans is lacking? AC: The 9th graders I teach are pretty precocious. Many have watched porn. Even worse, they’ve been indoctrinated to believe in the Hollywood version of sex, by which I mean vaginal intercourse with no foreplay. 9th graders think that the funniest sex movie in the world is 40-year-old Virgin. That is a funny movie, but I spend every class swimming against the message that sex works like it does in the film: Abstinence with no sexual contact then a move straight to vaginal intercourse, which is, needless to say, completely satisfying to the woman. But while today’s teens can only ever be as sexually competent as today’s adults, they do associate less shame with sex than my generation does, which is something I find hopeful.
BP: Warren St. John, from the New York Times, coined the term “fratire” to describe the recent guy-friendly trend in literature. How do you feel about this term and it being applied to your book? AC: No writer likes the idea of being classified. I’m sure that every author whose work gets tagged as chick lit rolls her eyes in despair. On learning that I was being called fratire, I did roll my eyes for a second, but then I realized that I should be grateful that someone had invented a marketing category for my work. All the writers of fratire have produced very distinct work that’s not ultimately that relatable. There are many differences between my writing and, say, that of Tucker Max, but I’m sure that the marketing department at my publisher and the buyers at bookstores were looking at Tucker Max’s numbers when they decided to take a chance on my book. So bottom line: thanks Tucker, thanks Warren.
BP: You also do stand-up comedy. Do you talk about your personal sexual experiences in your act, or do you use different material? AC: Different material for the most part. Right before I started writing on the book, I was trying to work stuff out on stage: I projected graphs and overheads and mock lectured about how to have sex with me. The act was going in a great direction, but I found the medium of stand-up wasn’t letting me explore the topic deeply enough. I ultimately decided that a book was a better bucket for the stories and ideas that were running around in my head.
BP: Do you keep a copy of the book in your bedroom for reference use? AC: Yes. For my reference.
For more, go to Adrian’s blog, which makes you laugh and feel smarter at the same time.
BookPeople 