By way of encouragement, the editor sent her some nonfiction classics, among them Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Gay Talese’s notorious 1981 exploration of sex culture in 1970s America (Talese, a pioneer of “new journalism”, ran a massage parlour as part of his research; during the writing of the book, he stayed at a clothing-optional resort). Taddeo, conscientious but curious too, went to see Talese, by then in his late 70s, at his home in New York. It was the first of what would turn out to be several false starts. “He said the only way I could come close to matching his so-called masterpiece would be if I went out and slept with married men. Well, I wasn’t going to do that.” Nor was she tempted to write about the porn industry. “I did travel to the San Francisco ‘porn castle’ [a former armoury owned by a company called kink.com], and it was really wild. I mean, it was full of women having sex. But it just didn’t seem that interesting to me.” In California, however, something shifted inside her. “At my hotel, I had an epiphany. I realised that I wanted to explore the desire behind intimate acts, not sex per se. The trouble was, I needed not only to find subjects, but subjects who were amenable to the idea of me writing about their desires.”
Some people travel with a particular objective in mind: to find the past in the present. It’s an impossibility, of course — you never truly succeed, because the present is so very present. But in a wayward, fast-moving world, a focus on history can root you, and offer perspective. This was my idea on a recent trip when I set out to find New York’s origins.
William Hazlitt recorded many peculiarities of his teenage idol Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among which was the habit of walking zig-zag fashion in front of his companion, “unable to keep on in a straight line” while endlessly, brilliantly, talking. Unlike William Wordsworth, Coleridge was said to prefer composing his verses while on uneven ground, “or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood”, terrain he considered more likely than a smooth, uninterrupted surface to foster the making of poetry.
Looking back three decades, it's hard to remember when Murray, Martin, Murphy and Aykroyd weren't part of the American scene. De Semlyen's welcome flashback reminds us why their very names still bring a smile to our faces.
Your electric sander? That saber saw
we couldn’t drag you from those weeks
you knotty-pine-panelled the basement,
rigged above your new wet bar the revolving
Schlitz sign scavenged from old Pat and Matt’s?