“The fact it’s so difficult doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, although of course, in the back of your mind, there’s always the Literary Review’s Bad Sex prize. “In every case, I remember it vividly and I wouldn’t want to simply close off that part of what a person experiences or remembers because it might make someone uncomfortable to read about it.”Īlso at the festival, Sebastian Faulks discussed the awkwardness of sex, which he said was “traditionally thought to be impossible because our vocabulary is so impoverished, and you either end up being pornographic or sugary sweet. “I know for myself that I have memories of those moments and they’ve stayed with me because they were sometimes great, sometimes terrible, sometimes super-awkward, sometimes remarkably not awkward. I can’t just draw a curtain over it because how a particular moment of sex plays out is important. ‘Our vocabulary is so impoverished, and you either end up being pornographic or sugary sweet’ĭefending his sex scenes, he said: “Sex is a big part of people’s lives, particularly young people. His interviewer at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the writer Clare Clark, did not provide much consolation when she told him that being nominated for the Bad Sex Award was “a twisted English compliment…they only award it to people who are good enough writers to know better.”įranzen said Clark had not offered him “a pathway to feeling ok about it”. The passage which caught their attention included Franzen referring to “a protruding pencil of tenderness”. “What was wrong with what I wrote? I don’t get it.”Īt the time, the Literary Review noted Franzen's “propensity for innuendo which comes over a bit Benny Hill”. “The Bad Sex Award is an English award, right?” he asked. His bestseller, Freedom, was nominated for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2010, a decision that still rankles. “It’s always weird talking about sex in my books in England because I feel like there’s a particularly harsh measure of what’s OK to write about and what’s not,” he said.
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