It’s been nearly 20 years since she wrote her semi-autobiographical novel “Party Girl,” a sex romp starring a cocaine-snorting magazine writer who boozes it up while chasing celebrity gossip. It’s a tale that closely mirrors David’s own downward spiral while a journalist in Hollywood in the 1990s and 2000s, an erratic period that included partying with movie stars, posing nearly nude for “Playboy” to accompany her first-person essays for the magazine and landing in rehab with a drug addiction.
Now raising her toddler son, the author regrets aspects of the novel that glorify her wanton younger years. So she came up with a plan: Write a new version, bury the original on the internet and spare her future teenager TMI about his mom.
“I just felt like PG-ing some of the NC-17,” says David, 54, who regained her rights to the book, which underperformed originally, and just released it through her own publishing company. If embarrassing stuff never dies on the internet, then David hopes to at least put hers into a coma.
Anna David wrote the tamer version to spare her future teenager TMI about his mom, she said.
David’s story is an extreme case from a certain era of now middle-aged writers, once-young literary exhibitionists who bared all in trendy sex-and-dating confessionals without worrying too much about a terrifying future audience: their children. The author has decided to run interference on her written legacy, using the tools of online publishing and the tricks of search engine optimization to bury her original book. Though other writers don’t go that far, they’re still nagged by the question: How do they handle their old revealing work when it’s out there in digital form, a few clicks away from a search-word-savvy child who goes to Amazon for a Lego set and comes back with a parent’s secrets?
Joe Oestreich, 55, lays out his romantic past in “Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll,” a 2012 memoir about the many decades he spent in a never-famous rock band. It includes a part in which then 20-year-old Oestreich pursues a romantic relationship with a 15-year-old. His two kids, one of them now 15, know that girl ended up being their mom—but they have no idea about all the steamy details with the high-schooler.
“My kids don’t know that story, and I don’t want them to know just yet,” says Oestreich, who has been married to their mom for 25 years. In child-rearing, like in memoir writing, there’s something to be said for controlling the narrative. “You owe them the truth,” he says of kids and readers, “but not all at once.”
Oestreich, who teaches memoir writing at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C., encourages his students to think about the intimate moments they’re sharing in their work. “The first step of growth for a novice writer is giving themselves the freedom to reveal these kinds of details,” he says. “I do think that maybe the next step in the development of the writer is to figure out what you don’t have to tell. As I’ve gotten more experienced, I’ve gotten a little bit more guarded.”
So far, his own children haven’t shown any interest in the book, which he leaves lying around so as not to “fetishize it.” He knows one day he’ll tell them about the memoir’s contents.
“I’m a writer—I’m starving for positive feedback at all times,” he says. “The crushing thing will be if they hate it or if they think it’s boring.” Or, maybe worse, never read it.
Tessa Fontaine, 41, whose 2018 memoir “The Electric Woman” chronicled a troubled parent-child relationship, is braced for her daughter to learn that Fontaine questioned her attachment to her own mother.
“I really didn’t believe that I loved my mom for my whole childhood and adolescence and early 20s,” she says. “Now that I’m a mother, it’s the most horrifying thing you can imagine, for your kid to feel that way about you. I think it just feels really vulnerable to have that piece of the story out there, as if it could be contagious, as if she would read it and be like, ‘Oh, I, too, feel this way.’”
Fontaine is still figuring out how she’ll talk about her past with her daughter, who, at three years old, is a long way from reading the memoir. Eventually, the author hopes the book will build on an ongoing conversation with her child. “She’ll get to have this private experience of reading about that relationship, and we can keep talking more about it. It gives her this entry point into some of those challenges for me.”
Tessa Fontaine, whose memoir ‘The Electric Woman’ chronicled her troubled relationship with her mother, is still figuring out how she’ll talk about her past with her daughter.
The “Party Girl” rerelease is about more than just creating a clean version for the kids, as the music industry does with songs. It’s also a marketing opportunity for a novel that rolled out just after its intended HarperCollins publishing imprint, ReganBooks, folded. David blames that disruption for the lackluster launch of “Party Girl.” Now she hopes to reposition the book as Quit Lit, a sobriety genre that hadn’t taken off when “Party Girl” came out in 2007.
Rights to “Party Girl” reverted back free to David in 2020, but it took multiple attempts by David, her agent and her lawyer to make the transfer official. The book has been optioned for screen adaptations multiple times, the author says, but no productions are in the works.
David, who battled a cocaine addiction for two years and has been sober since 2000, has written fiction and nonfiction, curated anthologies and co-authored works including actor Tom Sizemore’s bestselling memoir. In 2018, she founded Legacy Launch Pad Publishing, a hybrid model where author and publisher share the cost of releasing a book. In 2023, her son was born by surrogate and her worldview shifted.
Last year, she spent roughly four months combing through “Party Girl,” which one critic called “crasser than most.” She toned down, vagued up and cut out the graphic parts. She excised 32 F-words, a passage involving a vibrator, scenes with sex acts and the more graphic details of a threesome.
She also altered elements she says would get her canceled today, like making the service workers Latino and calling a grinding dancer in a tube top “prepubescent.”
After all this effort, David knows that if her son eventually wants to see the original book, he’ll find it. She hopes to mitigate the impact. “I just know how embarrassing parents can be anyway to any teenager,” she says. “I don’t really want to add to that.”
Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com
As a writer, it’s not uncommon to explore different genres and themes in our work. However, when one mother decided to venture into the world of racy romance novels, she never expected the potential consequences that could come with it.
After months of hard work and dedication, she finally published her steamy novel, filled with passion, desire, and all the things that make for a thrilling read. But now, as she sits back and admires her work, a wave of worry washes over her.
What if her son stumbles upon her book? How would he react to his mother’s provocative writing? Would he be shocked, embarrassed, or worse, disappointed?
These are the questions that plague her mind as she grapples with the idea of her son discovering her secret side. Will she have to come clean and explain herself, or will she have to keep her writing under wraps forever?
Only time will tell how this mother’s dilemma will unfold, but one thing is for sure – writing a racy book can lead to some unexpected consequences.
Tags:
- Racy book
- Motherhood concerns
- Family secrets
- Keeping secrets
- Confidential writing
- Parenting worries
- Censorship in literature
- Privacy concerns
- Adult content
- Book publishing anxieties
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