The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

“The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories
is a dangerous joy of literary pleasure—a compelling, spellbinding reading experience. In this book, Pagan Kennedy writes with clarity, honesty and impeccable grace.”

—Lee Gutkind, editor of
Creative Nonfiction
and author of
Almost Human: Making Robots Think

 

“The most daring writer I know, Pagan Kennedy prowls the shadowy, creepy, eye-popping limits of the culture where other writers fear to tread. And the stories she brings back are so tomorrow, if not so next year, that I sometimes wonder how life can ever catch up. This book is a crystal ball. Take a look: Your future is inside.”

—John Sedgwick, author of
The Dark House
and
The Education of Mrs. Bemis

 

 

PRAISE FOR
Black Livingstone,
a
New York Times
Notable Book and winner of the Massachusetts Book Award Honor in Nonfiction.

 

“Kennedy chronicles Sheppard's life with a near pitch-perfect combination of sympathy, drama and historical comprehension.”

—LA Times

 

“Kennedy offers a smoothly written tale of Sheppard's life and is to be commended for bringing his extraordinary story to greater prominence.””

—The Washington Post

 

“The author's enthusiasm for her subject is infectious and makes the book an engaging, quick read.”

—The Houston Chronicle

“In her absorbing and timely novel
Confessions of a Memory Eater,
Pagan Kennedy explores love, addiction, and memory in the pharmaceutical age….In fewer than 200 pages,
Confessions
packs an allegorical wallop.”

—
Entertainment Weekly
A ‘Must Read for Summer '06' Full Page Feature Review

 

“Pagan Kennedy charges into the future with impressive dexterity….
Confessions of a Memory Eater
is just a moving portrait of mankind's chronic and untreatable case of folly.”

—New York Times Book Review

 

“What Kennedy has written is a provocative novel, fast-paced and delicious.”

—Newsday

 

“
Confessions of a Memory Eater,
by Pagan Kennedy is the perfect distillation of a midlife crisis, except it's a hundred times more fun and entertaining than that sounds. A former academic wunderkind, Win Duncan discovers a drug that allows you to relive any memory as if it were happening right now. But the drug, mem, works better if you take it with someone else who shares the same memory. Nostalgia becomes a consumer item for a cast of characters who are less than the sum of their pasts. Give this book to your friends and they'll be way more interesting to talk to afterward.”

—San Francisco Bay Guardian

 

“Pagan Kennedy, a '90s 'zinequeen turned novelist, ventures into a surreal genre of time travel, addiction, and midlife crises in her new novel
Confessions of a Memory Eater
[which] succeeds in
being both a quick, suspenseful read and a more thoughtful probe into what exactly we fear we lose with age….
Confessions of a Memory Eater
nudges readers to explore their own troves.”

—
Boldtype.com

 

“Telling, wistful and heartbreaking… Kennedy's narrative packs such a wrenching emotional punch.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

“Kennedy turns in a surprisingly bittersweet novel with science fiction overtones and a delicious premise…. [Her] easy style masks a fierce intelligence and painstaking artistry in this melancholy midlife crisis-with-a-twist.“

—Publishers Weekly

 

“I've been dreaming of the pill that would take me back to Halloween '94, when I made out with the hottest guy in the universe. Pagan's novel takes that idea—a pharmaceutical called Mem—and runs with it. The story is a total mind melt-down that kept me reading even though I was distracted thinking about that amazing night…”

—JANE,
June/July '06

 

“Eschewing TV's manipulative cheap tricks, Kennedy invents a drug that allows people to access memories and refeel them, in the process raising larger questions about identity. Who (or perhaps when) is your true self? Is the realest you the one who lives in the present moment? Or is it the person you once were, at eight, at 27?…Think of it as a kind of future non-fiction—it's fiction now, but maybe not for long. In the meantime, she dramatizes the elements of time, memory, and identity in all their fluid dynamics.”

—The Boston Phoenix

 

“The memory-enhancing pill at the center of Pagan Kennedy's new novel works like Proust's madeleine in overdrive: It doesn't just pave the way to relaxed reverie but allows people to relive, in detail, any past experience that they choose. That's an enticing concept for nostalgia junkies, but as C
onfessions of a Memory Eater
reveals, the rewards of such a drug are inevitably trumped by its perils….With a mixture of wit and emotional honesty, fizzy prose and Technicolor descriptive passages, the premise of
Confessions
may be pulpy, but it makes a memorable point: The pleasures of youth should have an expiration date.”

—Time Out New York

 

“Kennedy resists the temptation to inflict a politically correct paradigm on her story and simply lets it tell itself….The result is a page-turner that illuminates as it breaks the heart.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair and a Twentieth Century Medical Revolution

Confessions of a Memory Eater

Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in 19th-Century Congo

The Exes

Spinsters

'Zine

Stripping

Platforms

Copyright © 2008 by Pagan Kennedy

 

All rights reserved under international and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions

 

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a database, or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

 

Santa Fe Writers Project, SFWP and colophon are trademarks.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Kennedy, Pagan, 1962-

The dangerous joy of Dr. Sex and other true stories/Pagan Kennedy.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-9776799-3-4 (trade paper)

1. Eccentrics and eccentricities—United States—Biography.

2. Eccentrics and eccentricities—United States—Anecdotes.

3. Eccentrics and eccentricities—United States—Humor. I. Title.

PS3561.E4269D36 2008

818'.54—dc22

2008005457

 

Cover design by Bill Douglas at The Bang

Printed and bound in Canada

 

Visit SFWP's website:
www.sfwp.com
and literary journal:
www.sfwp.org

 

Santa Fe • Washington, DC

 

TRANS 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Kevin

I learned about secret doorways when I was a kid. One summer afternoon, my grandmother and I perched on her bed together; she balanced a book on her lap and read to me about Alice, who passed through a mirror as easily as you'd push through a curtain.

“I'm going to do that,” I told my grandmother, touching the illustration, which showed a girl in striped stockings emerging into Looking Glass Land.

“Oh no, Honey. She didn't really. It was just a dream she had by the fire,” my grandmother told me in her breathy Virginia accent, which turned the word “fire” into “far,” and made everything sound like a question.

I knew she was wrong. Books didn't lie. Why would an author sit writing at his desk for years just to describe a world that didn't exist? And besides, this business about Alice was clearly meant to be a set of instructions. You only had to follow them to get into Wonderland. Any idiot could see that. “I'm going to do it,” I said, and jumped off the bed, padding over to the other end of the room. I stood in front of my grandparent's oval mirror, which I had already decided must be magic because of its extreme age, tarnished glass, and gilt frame. I leaned so close that my breath fogged up the surface. I touched the mirror, gingerly, probing for
a chink. When that didn't work, I studied the images reflected on the glass for clues: the backwards room, a curtain curled around buttery sunlight, and my grandmother propped up on the bed, her pantyhose-covered legs a curious and unconvincing shade of skin tone. Objects carried a significance that they did not have in real life. Outside the mirror-window, in the wrong-way yard, a cedar tree pointed like a gnomon with its purple shadow. What lay beyond? Was there a reverse me hiding in the topsy-turvy streets? Like Alice, I was convinced that on the other side, just out of the frame of the mirror, reality warped and buckled.

I scooped up the book, and then carried it over to the mirror, holding it open to its own image. There I saw its code, the backwards writing like a dispatch from another universe. I was on the right track. The secret had something to do with books and language, and the places where the world turns weird. But I still couldn't find the way through.

When I was in my 20s, a pattern of leaves on the sidewalk or the crook of a lamppost would fill me with longing. Out of nowhere, I would be seized with homesickness for a place that never existed.
When that happened, I would rush back to my desk and begin a short story. By making a spell out of words, an incantation of characters, I hoped I could travel into that other land, the place where I belonged.

In those days, I also wrote nonfiction, but only to pay the bills: I churned out last-minute blurbs for
Interview,
think pieces for
The Village Voice,
ruminations about literature for
The Nation.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the alternative weeklies ruled the publishing universe; they paid well enough that I could scrape together a living from them. Still, I considered myself a fiction writer. Making stuff up would be my “real” work. I needed to find the place that—more than America—I knew to be my country. But I only seemed to travel to my homeland in the saccade of reading, that instant of the eye catching up a bundle of words and transmitting a pulse of understanding in the brain. In the next moment I lost my home. Blink: I had it. Blink: it was gone. How to live there?

More so even than novels, I loved the New Journalism of the 1960s, those bad-boy books that turned reportage into a grand, show-offy art.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
and
Hell's Angels
by Hunter Thompson,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe,
and anything at all by Truman Capote—these books appeared as if they had simply winked into existence, too grand to be the work of one human being. I used to stare at pages of
Electric Kool-Aid
, trying to understand how Wolfe had managed to turn raw experience into a fable. Had he used a tape recorder all through the months he spent with the Merry Pranksters? Would a machine even be able to capture conversation on a noisy bus? And once he had thousands of pages of notes, what alchemy had he used to make his book feel like an acid trip?

So for years, I was a fiction writer with a side-fetish for truth stories. Or rather, I was too intimidated by the prospect of uniting the techniques of journalism and fiction to attempt it myself. And then one day in 1996, I stumbled across an untold true story, one that I knew would make a magnificent book. Once I began that story, questions about research and technique hardly mattered. Obsession became my teacher. While reading a history of Africa, I had come across a fascinating anecdote: In the late 19th century, two American missionaries set out to explore the Congo and establish an outpost there. One of the men was black and the other white. In the United States, Jim Crow laws would have barred the two men from so much as eating together. But in the Congo, the
two missionaries slept in a tent together, nursed each other through illnesses, and eventually founded a town together. After Sam Lapsley—the white man—died, William Sheppard became the first explorer ever to enter the “forbidden kingdom” of the Kuba people; he also collected evidence of atrocities that put him at the center of an international human-rights effort. The story haunted me. I could not stop wondering about William Sheppard.

I felt utterly unqualified to tell this story. Still, what choice did I have? Here was the doorway into another world, the kind I'd been looking for all my life. Sheppard seemed to hold the key. I had to understand who this exceptional man had been, how he'd managed to reinvent himself from dirt-poor preacher to internationally known explorer. I pored over his writings in an attempt to get closer to Sheppard. He came to me in dreams, in his high Victorian collar, with that glint in his eye, but he would tell me nothing, not even in the realm of sleep.

At this point, my grandma—the one who introduced me to Alice and mirrors—was dying. She'd lost most of her hearing and was completely blind, shut into her own memories. To communicate with her, you had to scream into her good ear. I wrote a letter to her about my Sheppard project; someone had to shout the message to
her. And then she dictated a message to me: she had something important to tell me about Congo missionaries. Next time I traveled down South to visit her, she propped herself up on her bed, her blue eyes staring out at nothing, her hair perfectly coifed into a meringue, and told me that her first cousin had been a missionary in the Congo in the early 1900s. In that moment, I discovered another door leading from the real to the fantastic—and once again, my grandmother had opened it for me. In my researches, I had frequently come across references to Robert Dabney Bedinger; he had written the first-ever biography of William Sheppard, who had been his colleague in the Congo. Bedinger had been Sheppard's greatest defender. I had never suspected a connection to my own family. Now I knew it was in my blood. My grandmother's maiden name—signifier of her lost girlhood identity, of her lost Alice-hood—was Bedinger.

It was at that point that the Sheppard project had evolved from hobby to avocation. I wrote up a book proposal, working to master the unfamiliar form of the “nonfiction novel.” Viking Press bought the idea, and the book became my full-time job. The production of this biography felt entirely different than anything I'd done before. As a novelist and short-story writer, I'd had to force myself to park myself at my desk. To invent imaginary
characters, you have to create a vast fake film set in your brain where your fake people can pace, gesture, and speak. This can be horrible, especially when your jerry-built world reveals itself to be nothing but cardboard. Now, however, I found myself working for twelve hours with no effort, pulled by my research into what had become a labyrinth of clues about William Sheppard.

The facts infected me like tropical fever, and I couldn't stop digging for more, another document, another revelation. I wrote with a new kind of vigor; I wanted everyone to see the shining shards I had dug up, to understand them and to
care
. It saddened me that so few Americans knew what had happened during the worst years of the Congo holocaust. I wrote that book under the shadow of the Rwanda genocide of 1994, disgusted that my country had done so little to intervene, and asking myself painful questions about why I failed to live up to my own values. As I pieced together William Sheppard's story, I sometimes felt I had plummeted straight through a wormhole, into another person's mind; at other times, William Sheppard seemed to run far ahead of me, impossibly remote, and the best I could do was study a boot print he'd left behind. Even when I was lost, I felt passionately in love with Sheppard and his story. Now I knew that I'd always been
a nonfiction writer. And indeed, though I have returned to fiction occasionally, the true story remains my true love.

After the book came out in 2002, it won awards. Magazine editors began approaching me, presenting me with offers that I had never dared to hope would come my way. Now I suddenly could fly around the country and chase down true stories as they unfolded. Of course, I'd been a journalist off and on for fifteen years, but in the past, I'd usually worked on the cheap. It's amazing how much difference an expense account makes—now I could follow my subjects for days, a spy with a rental car. After years in the library, I was intoxicated by the possibilities of reporting on the present moment. The wealth of detail dazzled me; I could study their clothes, gestures, knickknacks, voices; I could hang around for days and watch events unfold, accumulating twenty hours of tape. It felt almost like cheating to me, this process of observing, recording, and boiling it all down into a story.

And so I found the doorway to my homeland where I'd least expected it: here in America.

No one can agree what to call this chimerical genre, journalism wrapped up in the art of fiction. Truman Capote described
In Cold
Blood
as the first “nonfiction novel.” Lee Gutkind, renowned teacher, calls the form “creative nonfiction.” My friend Kent Bruyneel—editor of
Grain,
a Canadian literary magazine—has come up with the moniker “not fiction.” I've always been partial to the term “true story,” because of the simplicity and democracy of that phrase.

Why so many names? I suspect it's because everyone has a different opinion about the truth. For some writers, it's OK to alter minor details in the service of the story; for others, this fudging of the truth amounts to a lie. I spent too many years as a fact-checking drone to be able to cheat the details—I don't fabricate at all. Still, I have to say that great art excuses everything. I understand when a nonfiction author makes a few minor tweaks in service to the scene. When you examine some of Truman Capote's true stories—for instance, the psycho-killer-on-the-loose thriller “Handcarved Coffins”—it becomes clear that he must have smudged some facts, for the story fits together
too
neatly. At the end of the piece, Capote “solves” the mystery and “finds” the killer inside of a fantasy—because, in real life, he was unable to nail the powerful rancher who probably committed the murders. Had he published the piece today, he no doubt would have been called on the carpet by Oprah and forced to account for his lies and inventions. And that would
have been a shame, because “Handcarved Coffins” is a masterpiece; indeed, when you read it you feel yourself gripped with a fever dream in which accuracy is simply beside the point.

And yet, Capote was at his greatest when he stuck to the facts. Even the most fertile imagination could not invent some of the dialogue of
In Cold Blood.
Perry, on death row: “I really admired Mr. Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat.” That's the kind of dialogue you can only bag after spending days listening to someone, and then sifting through your transcripts for the one sentence that contains that character's very DNA.