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| Photo by Simon Baier |
Marina DelVecchio is the author of the new memoir Unsexed: Memoirs of a Prostitute's Daughter. Her other books include Dear Jane. She is also an educator, and she lives in North Carolina.
Q: Why did you decide to write Unsexed?
A: I wrote Unsexed because I wanted to trace the trauma that manifested in my body back to its origins. I knew my reactions to my body and sexuality came from my mothers (the birth mother, a prostitute; the adoptive mother, a virgin), but I wanted a roadmap of sorts to understand how it was showing up in my marriage and in my resistance to have sex for 10 years while I was married.
Q: The writer Adrienne Moore called the book “a searingly honest, painful, beautifully expressed, and ultimately transcendent story about the damage caused by the absence of love, and the healing that becomes possible with truth and courage.” What do you think of that description?
A: Adrienne Moore is a wordsmith, so her praise is quite meaningful to me.
I always write the truth, no matter how painful it is for me. I use my writing to grapple with the experiences women have that are not given voice to.
I think that this absence of female confessions about sex, motherhood, and marriage made me feel very alone and abnormal in my own marriage, sexuality, and my role as a mom.
A lot of women don't want to talk about these issues -- they're too private, painful, and disarming. There is a lot of shame in our marriages, in the sex that we have been taught to have, and in the mothering of our children, and women fear the exposure and shaming that comes when we reveal how difficult these experiences are.
My writing has always been described as "raw," "searing," and "honest," because I want to bring the shame out into the open and show us women that we have nothing to be ashamed of.
It is harmful to live in silence, and the more we speak out about our experiences, the more we are likely to see that the problem is not with us -- it's with the social constructs and contracts that are being imposed on us because we are women; this includes marriage, the sex scripts we are forced to abide by, and all the complexities that come with motherhood.
Q: How was the memoir’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Unsexed has two stories of origin for the title I chose.
First, unsexed means not having a sexuality, and 10 years of my 22-year marriage consisted of no sex because, I realize now, I did not feel safe with my then-husband.
Sex has always been problematic for me because my birth mother was a prostitute and I grew up observing her with johns and her pimp. Everything I have done since my childhood was to prevent myself from ever having to make that kind of choice.
Completely opposite the whore construct was my adoptive mother, who was a virgin -- she never dated, and I grew up in a world with no men.
Both of them had an impact on me because even in my late teens and early 20s, I had to have complete control of my body. Controlling it during my marriage was not a new concept for me. I can only have sex when I feel loved and safe.
This brings us to the second meaning behind my title: fear. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth prays to be unsexed before committing murder for her husband's rise to power.
When she says, "unsex me here," she is asking that her sex, her femininity, and all the weaknesses ascribed to females be removed so she can act the way a man does -- with power, vengeance, and strength.
I was unsexed in my marriage by withholding sex from my husband, but I was also afraid to leave him, to break my family apart, to live without the one person who had saved me from my adoptive mother's abuse only to replace it with his own.
Unsexed had to end with me finding the courage I needed to leave my husband, and I needed to "unsex" myself -- to shed the fears, insecurities, and feelings of guilt often associated with women -- before I could leave him and the life I had known since I was 23 years old.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Writing the book gave me the courage I needed to leave my husband. After laying everything out on the pages, staying would have been a coward's choice.
In writing about my experiences and how they manifested in my marriage, I was also able to see how my staying in a toxic marriage was hurting my children, and in the end, I had to leave. I had to end it all and start from scratch.
For women readers, I hope they see that writing out our pain, our marriages, our mothering, and our sexuality sheds light on the complexities but also the choices that we have to be honest about our lives and our relationships.
That leaving a bad marriage is hard -- the hardest thing I've ever done -- but it is possible. It's reaffirming and shows how powerful we really are. We are worth the love and respect we want, and it's never too late to start over and manifest a healthy, positive life for ourselves.
For male readers, I want them to see what it is like to navigate this world in our bodies, inside our skin. It is hard. Men make it harder because they don't realize how scary and disarming it is for us to trust them, sleep with them, and forge a life with them.
Even if not all men are the culprits of violence and abuse, verbal or physical, they contribute to the silence that exists around women's complex lives by not standing up for us, not believing us, and not doing their part in their roles as husbands, fathers, and lovers.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am finishing up a novel titled "As You Lay Dying," about a woman's visit to her comatose, dying mother in a hospital. In the six days that make up their reunion, a "searing," "raw," and "honest" conversation takes place in which the daughter tells the mother everything she never said aloud when it came to her mother's callousness and denials of love or affection.
It is a (love) letter to my own adoptive mother, all the words I cannot say to her and never will because she cut my tongue off early in my childhood, metaphorically. I write because I was not allowed to speak my truth to her.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thank you for this opportunity to share my life and my book with you and your readers. I encourage all women to say the unsayable and to write the unwritable in women's lives. Write your stories.
We have to share our truths with each other to see that we are not alone in our experiences, but also to become aware that our lives and experiences mirror each other's lives and experiences.
Our lives are universal, and when it comes to our bodies, our sex, our mothering, we have a lot in common--even if our origins are vastly different.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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