What makes a good sex scene?
Since the house of fiction is large, holding infinite rooms, I suppose there must be at least as many varieties of well-imagined sex scenes. But when I’m writing one, I ask my characters what they want, what else they want, and what else on top of that. I want so much, all the time, and my characters usually do, too.
The artists in “Exhibit” are often met with anonymous hostility. Do you write that from experience?
Each time I publish anything that contains an explicitly political opinion, I’ve drawn strangers’ hostility, some of it startlingly violent. I’ve had death threats, and rape threats; from talking to friends, I know I’m hardly alone. It might be a condition of living as a woman with publicly stated opinions: People are going to tell us they want us dead. I’m hearing a bravado in what I’m saying, though, that I don’t always feel. It can be alarming. I wish things were otherwise.
How do you sign books to your fans?
I have a dojang, a stamp with my Korean name, 권오경, that I use when signing books. I’d have loved to publish under my Korean name, Okyong, but it’s physically not pronounceable for most Americans, so I’m especially glad to at least sign books with my birth name.
What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
“Cursed Bunny,” by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur, includes stories with such unexpected pleasures and jolts that I kept shout-laughing while reading it. I also just reread William Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” featuring Becky Sharp, one of the more appetitive women in Anglophone letters. She’s bold, exuberant, monstrous, a delight. I’m revisiting Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s extraordinary “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” and it frequently cracks me up.
What subjects do you wish more authors wrote about?
I want more of people’s bodies in books, especially in fiction. There’s so much about our bodies that’s still judged shameful, a secret best kept hidden. I’m not just talking about sex, though that’s part of it; I’m ever avid for the details, vicissitudes and marvels of existing in these altering, fated-to-expire forms. Jenny Zhang and Vauhini Vara, among others, are brilliant in how they depict fictional bodies.
