In The Rose (Mira, April), a sacred prostitute of Eros draws an earl’s daughter into mystical sexual visions based on Greek myth.
How did you research the myths you chose?
I did a lot of digging into a whole bunch of texts when I was trying to pick the various myths. I wanted a very wide variety of them. I have this big stack of research books, Bulfinch’s Mythology, and History of Ancient Greece, Creatures of Arcadia. And most of my research ended up just being Googling “Greek mythology sex” and seeing what popped up. Then I would go to the older texts and dig a little deeper for nuance and alternate variations. You know, these stories are so ancient, they’ve been told hundreds of different ways, and there’s different traditions for them. For example, Andromeda and Perseus. I love the original Clash of the Titans with Harry Hamlin, and I loved the relationship between Andromeda and Perseus, in that they’re friends. The movie ends while they’re in bed on their wedding night, and you don’t get to see what happens, so I went all the way there. That was sort of Clash of the Titans fan fiction.
Did you have fun thinking up the supernatural sex adventures of a sacred prostitute of Eros?
Oh, yes. It was just joyful. He’s such a fun character. And you cannot go too weird with Greek mythology. Having sex with a cloud is nothing compared to having sex with Zeus in the form of a shower of gold or as a ginormous swan. Anything I can come up with pales in comparison to what the ancient Greeks came up with, so it was really just open season.
Your characters laugh a lot, in bed and out of it. What makes laughter so important to an erotic story?
Well, I have always been attracted to funny people. My first enormous celebrity crush was David Letterman when I was 12 years old. I’ve had a crush on Conan O’Brien, I’ve had a crush on Stephen Colbert. Apparently talk show hosts do it for me. My husband, Andrew Shaffer, is a humor writer. I find humor so sexy, because you have to be smart to be funny, especially if you’re funny in a way that is not hurtful. But yeah, it’s just so joyful to have a sexy laugh with someone. My favorite movie of all time is the Kenneth Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, which is this boisterous, playful, sexy Shakespeare comedy where every character is funny and beautiful and happy, and the movie just makes you want to dance and spin around and sing. And I kind of was going for that tone in The Rose when I was writing the ending. I wanted people to get up and spin and dance and feel happy.
