Yesterday I woke up and saw that I had texted the following note to myself: “A fond response.” I was flummoxed. Fond response to what?!

And then I remembered. But first, some backstory. I just finished ’s Animal Instinct, which was terrific—funny and engaging and steamy. While reading I kept thinking, not in a million years could I write sex scenes like these. I also recently finished Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests, which also had sex scenes but it was set in the 1920s so the characters would do things like “reach their inevitable crisis” (rowr!) or “clasp all the more fervently” at each other. And I was like, yep, that’s pretty much all I could handle, writing-wise, without blushing to death. I’m not a prude but what if my mom read it?!

So anyway I eventually realized that “a fond response” was what I had come up with in the middle of the night as the blandest, most anodyne description of orgasm. As in: “she gave her fond response.” That’s pretty much how I would write about sex: like someone waving a hankie out of their train car.