Did that really happen?

by Giselle Renarde

A few months ago, I devoured a book of funny little stories about living with roommates. The reason I picked up The Roommates: True Tales of Friendship, Rivalry, Romance, and Disturbingly Close Quarters is that I've never lived with people. Well, I lived with family, growing up, but I've lived alone all my adult life.

I was curious about the lifestyle. I wanted to know what it was really like to have roommates. One of my sisters has lived with tons of friends, fellow university students, even strangers. And has she got tales to tell! That's what I hoped to find in this book.

And I totally did! Truth stranger than fiction--that sort of thing. Do you ever experience something in your life and go, "Man, if I wrote this in a story readers would say, THAT COULD NEVER HAPPEN"? I love stuff like that.

(By the way, I just looked up The Roommates on Amazon and it had nothing but poor reviews, so I left a positive one.  Do you ever love a book, then see all these terrible customer reviews and wonder if you're stupid or something? Like, what did I miss?)

Anyhoo...

Next week, my third book of erotic confessions hits the market. The first one was Secret Confessions (a veritable smorgasbord of erotica), the second was Sapphic Confessions (all lesbians, all the time!), and this one will be called Spicy Confessions: 12 Steamy Sex Stories.

I've written a lot of letter-style erotica over the years. That's pretty much how I started my career in this industry. Are all my confessions true? Ummm... no. Are some of them true. Well... yes.

What's the appeal of confessional erotica? It's gotta be the curiosity factor. I'm curious about roommates because I've never had roommates. Readers are curious about sex because they've never had sex.

Wait... that doesn't sound right. Maybe readers just want to know what's going on in other people's bedrooms. Maybe they want to draw ideas from other people's experiences. Maybe they haven't had THAT kind of sex. Maybe they have had that kind of sex and want to read about other people's experience of same--good, bad or mediocre.

I'm upfront in my Confessions books about some stories being true and some being false. Actually, some are in between as well. Some are things I wish had happened.

Ultimately, how much would a reader care if a story they thought was true wasn't really?

If you told me none of the stories in The Roommates were true, it honestly wouldn't matter to me. I was entertained by the book. That's good enough for me.

I'm the same way with ghost stories. I think I've mentioned before that I love those "my real ghost story" TV shows. Do I necessarily believe everything the interviewees tell the camera? I kind of think I don't believe or disbelieve them. I don't think people are lying, but I also know TV is there to entertain me, and a lot of that entertainment involves deception.

So, what's your take on true sex stories, or true anything stories? Why do people crave them? And does it matter if they really are true?