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sentence in one of my published novels and not have the slightest memory of having composed it. (I’m convinced that this alchemy of creativity is one reason writers are so fixated on the idea of plagiarism, and why so many interesting stories have been written about shady characters turning up, insisting they are the true author of the prize-winning, bestselling magnum opus, and demanding justice and royalties. Deep down, a part of us suspects that someone else has really written those pages and pages of text, and that we are fraudulently taking credit for them.) When it comes to this particular work, I’m even more at a loss. In fact, every time I try to remember what I was thinking as I wrote those things, those acts, those scenes, all I can come up with is: What was I thinking?
    Even at the time—and this much I do recall—I had no idea how I was producing this stuff. I hadn’t enough sexual fantasies of my own to fill a chapbook, let alone a novel devoted to sex, and though I’d read what might be called the classics of the genre, they weren’t much help. Fanny Hill seemed too tragic to emulate (enforced prostitution is never a turn-on, no matter how supposedly pleasurable for the prostitute—naturally this book was written by a man), My Secret Life too silly to take seriously (likewise written by a man), and Story of O lost all appeal for me when the whips and branding irons came out (written, famously, by a woman— for a man). Most fortunately, however, I was able to raid the great big public pantry of women’s sexual fantasies, thanks to Nancy Friday and her 1973 classic anthology, My Secret Garden, a book that provided me with an astonishing range of fictional scenarios. (I didn’t have a reference copy in my rustic little cabin in the New England woods, but I had a very good memory.) Friday’s feminist approach to women’s sexuality was also helpful to me, in that it allowed me to distinguish what I was doing from pornography, which I abhorred. It was deeply important to me that the woman at the center of my story be thoroughly in control physically, emotionally, and financially—the boss of herself, nobody’s victim, a person who does exactly what she wants to do for reasons she herself comes to understand only gradually.
    To my amazement, the story developed easily, almost effortlessly. Plot had always been hard for me, the weakest link in my two spurned manuscripts, but here, in this book I had neither planned out nor obsessed over, things unfolded naturally. Maybe all the copulating these characters were doing rendered them too relaxed to behave awkwardly. As I made my way into the story, it also became clear to me that, whatever else the novel was becoming, it was also turning into a mystery. This was a surprise of its own. I had certainly not set out to write a mystery. I did not even particularly enjoy reading mysteries. And yet my heroine was becoming murderous before my eyes. Before I knew it, and between set pieces of serious sensuality, she began plotting a perfect crime. Then she carried it out.
    And then it was over. To my absolute shock, I had completed a two hundred-odd-page novel in just under two weeks. There it sat, snug in its manuscript box, eyeing me (so to speak). What was I supposed to do with it?
    This is what I did with it. I told my husband. He was horrified. I was horrified all over again. But I wanted desperately to publish a book. I wanted to publish a book even more than I wanted to be known for having published a book. I promised to keep writing my “real” novels, I told him, but I was going to try to publish this one.
    I picked a pseudonym, and I picked an agent, a woman my own age whom I’d met in publishing circles. (Of course, she had to read the manuscript, knowing I was the author—that was hard—but it was also the last time. From the outset I’d decided that people could either read the novel or know I’d written the novel, but not both.) I handed over my