Sex in Literature

Luna

by Nic Penrake

 

I wrote "Luna" (Ful title: "Hi, I'm Luna, I'm a Sex Addict" )in 2009, about a year after I'd finished "Sisi & Sonia". It originated from an idea I had for a TV series. A script consultant read the episode featuring the character of Luna, and said very warm things about it, and as I'd had no script agent at the time, I decided to turn it into a novel.

Coming from a script, it was  bound to be visual and dramatic – and I remained faithful to that way of telling the story.

 

Genre

Literary fiction with cross-over to thriller and romance genres

 

Logline

A painter’s worries over money lead her to take extreme measures to revamp her career and see her become dangerously entangled with a French swinging couple.

Word count Approx 95,000 words

Compatible titles

The Post Birthday World & Double Fault – Lionel Shriver

Prozac Nation – Elizabeth Wurtzel

On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

Taming the Beast – Emily Maguire

3 – Julie Hilden

The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl – Brooke Magnanti

Submission – Marthe Blau Market

 

Written like a memoir or confessional, “Luna” describes an artist’s experience with sexually addictive behaviour that is partly explained by her abusive childhood. Luna relates with searing honesty her own character failings and how her ambition to create a new and more commercial series of paintings leads to a period of excessive sexual experimentation and, ultimately, a fateful love triangle situation with one of her models and his partner. Unlike a memoir, the story is not episodic or anecdotal. Literary fiction it may be, but the language and pace of ‘Luna’ will appeal to many thriller readers, while the sexual content will appeal to readers who have picked up bestsellers like “Belle de Jour” and erotic literary fiction like Marthe Blau’s “Submission”.

This is a domestic drama with the pace of a thriller, delivering compelling twists and a powerful double climax. “Luna” originated out of a TV treatment for a series about a sex addicts group. Luna was developed as a 50 minute script which received high praise from Phillip Shelley, the well known TV screenwriter and industry reader. He not only rated “Luna” highly, he also thought the series idea had huge potential.

When this book is published, the TV series idea will stand a better chance of being commissioned by e.g. Channel 5 under its remit of edgier UK drama. The novel, now with a fuller plot than the TV episode, has even more to recommend it as a piece of writing that is readily adaptable to the big screen. Several readers have said it would work as the kind of movie the French excel in. The fact that the two of the leading characters are French may well appeal to a French Production company and Canal Plus.

 

The Narrator

Readers have commented on Luna as a ‘sympathetic MC’, her plight one that many readers will relate to, especially women. Luna is an unusual narrator. To begin with she is a woman of mixed race who was brought up in London until her mum threw out her Iraqi/Persian father when she was 9. Luna and her mum then moved to Frankfurt where Luna did the rest of her schooling.

At the age of twenty-one, she escaped the Frankfurt drug scene to study Art in London. Luna has come through child abuse, drugs and alcoholism to become a relatively grounded woman, albeit an artist who remains drawn to the worlds of extremes. Because of her past we are perhaps more ready to forgive Luna the risky choices she makes.

What starts as an art project becomes a sexual adventure, a sort of cathartic journey that enables her to destroy some of the demons of her past even as she inadvertently draws more chaos into her life. Luna’s journey is hardly typical of a woman in her late thirties, and yet the feelings she is made to experience during her story are particularly poignant to any woman of that age and a little older.

In this story, sex, murder, miscarriage and birth all mash together to produce a new and hopeful ending which is also a new and hopeful beginning.

 

Themes - Sexual addiction

Sexual addiction is more and more talked about – but usually only insofar as it relates to the proclivities of celebrities, who anyway have licence to indulge in most kinds of wayward behaviour and still remain hot property. What is less known is that many ordinary women, women we wouldn’t perhaps normally expect to bump into at a Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous group, are also looking for some kind of help with their (usually) destructive sexual behaviour. Many of us, men and women, have had our promiscuous phases, even if they only lasted a few weeks. So we can relate to Luna’s plight, her issues, her ambition. And most of us will be able to sympathise with her choices because of what she was put through as a child.

- The creative drive It is Luna’s creative drive that works as the catalyst that turns Luna into a sex addict. The fascination here is that Luna literally throws her body and spirit into her art and physically puts herself on the canvas. Interestingly it is the paintings she makes of her grief of losing Bertrand and Mari that fetch the biggest prices at her Exhibition.

- The lesbian/bi-sexual relationship Post Bridget Jones, not so much who and where is Mr. Right? but, rather, Do I need a man at all, why not a woman? And if a man isn’t to be in the picture, can I make it work as a mum with a girlfriend?

 

Style

Even when there are just two people in the room, there is a highly dramatised sense of conflict and a central question that needs resolving. The way the sex is described is untypical for a female narrator – and owes it legitimacy to accounts and ‘confessions’ by four real women the writer knows well. For some, the sex may belong in the erotica genre, but the writing is more sophisticated than that and seeks to stimulate the mind as much as the senses. It’s the writer’s opinion – and experience – that many women these days are not afraid of expressing themselves exactly as men do – so let’s hear them speak.

 

Readers’ feedback

Script consultant Phillip Shelley wrote: “There’s an icy, Germanic quality to Luna’s dialogue and actions. You’ve created a strong sense of her trying (but failing) to remove herself emotionally from the situation she’s created.” Everyone who has read the opening 6 chapters has asked for more. No exceptions. One reader, an actress, when asked to write notes and feedback apologised saying, “I’m sorry, I got so absorbed in it I forgot to write any.”

 

Blurb

At 38, Luna’s career as a painter takes a sudden dive. The credit crunch is still grinding on and her regular buyers are too busy guarding their mortgages to invest in modern art. As her financial anxieties escalate, and she digs deeper for new, more ‘commercial’ ideas, she returns to the Pandora’s Box of the past, the sexual and physical abuse she experienced as a child.

And then, one day, she chances upon an idea for a new series of paintings that seems to offer her not just a way out of her financial mess, but a way in to a darker side of her sexuality that she believes will provide her with answers – answers she feels she must have before she hits menopause. But at what cost?

Her idea is radical and upsets her boyfriend. She goes for it nonetheless. And in pursuing her ambition, she throws herself into a sexual odyssey with a French swinging couple that oscillates dangerously between happiness and death. And yet, maybe her instincts have been right all along and she is slowly making her way to a kind of catharsis or rebirth too. 

 

Click on "proposal" to download the above as a PDF.

 

Download Luna, Chapters 1-5.