Delta of Venus

While I'll be forever reeling that these vignettes were written in the 1940s, the real narrative — for me — lies in the framework: Nin (among others) was commissioned by an unknown “collector” to write erotic literature for $1 a page (equal to $18 today), which she accepted to make ends meet. Henry Miller was also recruited. The idea of Nin and Miller, covertly romantically involved, writing hedonistic stories together “where the light was dim, the tea fragrant, the cake properly decadent,” interviewing friends for ideas and possibilities, and laughing at the bad and boring tastes of this not-so-secret secret collector... That's the biopic I want to see, and I want it co-created by Angela Robinson and Sally Wainwright for HBO.

An undercurrent of darkness runs through these stories. Despite the copious amounts of outrageous sex being had (it is erotica after all), every one of the characters seems to be fundamentally unfulfilled, indulging in sexual exploits in a desperately doomed attempt to ease some deep-seated suffering or neurosis. It's less about sex than about power, and for every beautiful description of wild adventure between mutually-consenting adults, there are several that are squicky and/or triggering (featuring various sorts of rape, emotional abuse, pedophilia, incest, bestiality, etc.) and many more borderline cases of subtle manipulation. Any and all of which might be your thing, and that's cool, but it doesn't do a lot for me.

I love it for that strangeness and for its astonishingly nuanced portrayal of human relationships, but for me, that undercurrent makes it function poorly as erotica... while the stories don't have enough narrative solidity to function well as anything else.