I started writing Comorbidities during one of the lockdowns. It was a short story about a couple of exhausted parents making a sex tape while their two young kids have a sleepover at Granny’s. I also have two young kids and am an exhausted parent, but when I wrote it, I’d never made a sex tape before and never seen one either. (Only one of those statements is now true; research needs, etc.)
I guess because of lockdown, the story was a double fantasy, the biggest being: imagine being able to send your kids to someone else’s house! But also: imagine the intimacy you could rekindle with your partner in a childless house!
‘Of course, it’s definitely not about us,’ I told my boyfriend
In a house with two children under the age of five, even having vanilla sex – with the kids downstairs watching Paw Patrol – feels at worst transgressive and at best highly pressurised. ‘Mummy, I want breakfast! I want breakfast! Breakfast!!!’
It’s a buzzkill, for sure.
So I wrote this funny little story of intimacy and relationships and the cluster of anxieties about rearing children in an internet-saturated world. I swear the sex-tape moment is no more than half a minute of the half-hour it takes to read the whole thing. It was fun to write and risqué: parents weren’t meant to be either making sex tapes or writing about sex tapes. Eventually I put the story away in a drawer, perhaps embarrassed, thinking it would never see the light of day. But when I salvaged it one morning in a clear-out, I realised it had potential. I thought it spoke to the deadly slime of the internet, and also had infinite rich possibilities for connection. It felt contemporary and up-to-date and I worked on it further.
I didn’t tell my boyfriend I’d written it (definitely should have), then I didn’t tell him I’d entered it for the BBC National Short Story Award. But, six months later, I did have to tell him that a story I’d written about a couple – a couple like us; yes, a couple like us who make a sex tape – had been shortlisted for the £15,000 prize.
‘Of course, it’s definitely not about us,’ I said to him, as he listened to the story for the first time when it was broadcast, alongside all the other shortlisted stories, at 3.30pm on a Monday, on Radio 4, to a million or so listeners.
Once again, we parked the kids in front of the TV and lay down on the bed, unmoving, listening to Charlotte Ritchie (from You, Ghosts and Call the Midwife) doing a brilliant rendition of my narrator: the mother-of-two trying to get her kink on in the sex-tape scene.
My parents were tuned in, as was the rest of my family, including my mother-in-law, who would – like the granny in the story – often rather generously take our kids off for a night at hers. I was cringing with embarrassment. It’s never comfortable to write about sex; worse to think everyone else was listening in.
‘What did you think?’ I asked my boyfriend afterwards.
Naomi Wood: ‘I’m now recommitted to the idea that everything can and should be written about’
‘It was great.’ He paused. ‘I mean, you could have asked me before sending it in.’
He was right. I should have. But I’d had no idea it would get so far: as a fiction writer, I was used to sending my stories out and meeting a 98 per cent annual rejection rate.
I bumped into my friend M the day after the broadcast. She was off with me and I couldn’t think why. Then I recalled that she came from a religious background, and it was at this point that I started to wonder if I’d lost the plot. What was I doing broadcasting my imagined sex life to the nation?
Then, in September, I found out I’d won the BBC award: a whopping £15,000. And, of course, what everyone wrote about was not the other themes of interracial marriage or climate-change anxiety, but ‘Author Wins Prize for Sparkling Sex Tape Story’. And that’s when the weirdness started to snowball.
After picking up my award, I came home to Norwich flush with success and enough money to live on for half a year. This is Norwich, everything’s cheap! I was chuffed.
But things were about to get tense, both in real life and online.
‘Congratulations,’ M texted me rather stiffly, but nothing else. The producer at the BBC said they’d had complaints: only a handful, but the books department was probably unused to receiving them. They didn’t have a choice about what time the story had to be broadcast on Radio 4, because the slot was always 3.30pm. It was, admittedly, smack-bang in the middle of the school run. Even redacted, it was shaky ground – blow jobs got shrunk to BJs; an orgasm or two got thrown out; the protagonist’s milk-leaky breasts stayed in, which was a point of principle for me.
People started messaging me. A lot were nice: they loved the story, it spoke to the way creating intimacy with a partner during the midnight zone of early motherhood was close to impossible. But other people questioned how I could have written such a thing: as if parents having sex was the main problem! Others questioned the timing: ‘It’s lunchtime, you sick f***s!’ they wrote to me on X/Twitter. Posts on the internet forum Gransnet abounded, complaining of the ‘lengthy and graphic description of oral sex’ – which actually did not even happen, because I’m not that prurient.
Sexbots, attracted to my name from ‘Author Wins Prize for Sparkling Sex Tape Story’ kept spamming me on X, asking if I wanted hook-ups with local Russian ladies in my area who were both single and frisky.
No, thank you.
‘Is it about you?’ ‘Is it about you?’ ‘Is it about you?’ almost everyone asked.
‘No,’ I said.
My boyfriend rejoined: ‘We actually rarely have sex.’
I’m not sure that helped. And that wasn’t strictly true anyway.
Things got worse. I kept texting M but received no reply. Eventually, she said she had started different shifts at work, but I knew it was because she didn’t like the story’s inner core. ‘Are you upset about it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
And that was that.
In the months after winning the award, I wondered if I’d done something wrong, offensive or obscene. But then it occurred to me that I should be writing things like this. Things about modern love and modern sex, and the difficulty of maintaining either, while the vast percentage of our lives as parents is spent in devotion to work or caring or sleeping – when we can get it.
So sexbots were now spamming me online, and I was forever attached to the phrase ‘sex tape while the kids are at Granny’s’, and I’d lost a friend, and I’m probably causing more havoc by writing this, but it made me recommitted to the idea that everything can and should be written about, even if it’s halfway a product of my imagination.
As I continue my writing – a novel, this time – I think that might be a burning beacon to navigate by.
Naomi’s short story collection This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, which includes Comorbidities, is published by Phoenix, £16.99. To order a copy for £14.44 until 11 August, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
