NAUGHTY, LITERARY WORKS

There is never enough to say or write about books. May they always reside among us. In a dream world, we lose AI and gain literature and the love for it. Kids lose their ipads and video games, return to the streets, and at night, hide under the sheets with a flashlight and favorite read. Ah, the good, old days, of finding fulfillment in secret and sometimes "dirty" books.

When I was 11, I used to hide in the attic of the house in which I lived with my family, to read forbidden lit, books that were considered "too old" for me at the time--like Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch--(what could that possibly mean?!). A few years later, came Phillip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, a female manifesto of sexual liberation, published in 1973, was the only book I packed to take with me when I ran away from home to live the wildest four years of my life, and became my own guide for living for a time.

There have been so many naughty, literary works since then. A dark, disturbing and extremely well-written memoir by Kathryn Harris in 1997, titled The Kiss, details a consensual incestuous four-year affair between the writer and her estranged father. I remember being introduced to this via The Oprah Winfrey Show, where Oprah, herself a victim of incestuous abuse, interviewed Harris on her book and that cringey, challenging subject.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M, by Catherine M, a French writer, published in 2001, describes the author's experiences with public sex and orgies, and became an international hit.

In 2002, journalist Elizabeth Hayt wrote a biting and sharp memoir about post-divorce, high society dating in New York titled, I'm No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving.

In 2004, Terri Bentley, a former New York City ballet dancer, wrote a spiritual and intellectual manifesto for anal sex, titled, The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir.

I thoroughly enjoyed Augusten Burrough's unsettling and often hilarious memoir, Running with Scissors, published in 2004, and made two years later into a film starring Joseph Cross, Annette Bening, Joseph Fiennes, and Jill Clayburgh among others, about the author's unorthodox growing up years.

All these books caused a stir coming into being. Literature should cause upheavals of one sort or other. Although not every "naughty" book is great, some of these may be to your taste. No doubt, they are all banned today.