Marina DelVecchio wanted to understand her sexuality and its origins, so she wrote "Unsexed" as a way to discover who she really was.
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
For 10 years into my marriage, I was unsexed, asexual, and I wrote "Unsexed" as a way to understand my sexuality and its origins. I grappled with the meaning of asexuality for a long time, trying to understand if this is who I was. For 10 years, I had no sexual desire, no desire to be touched, made love to, kissed, or even held by the man I had married 16 years earlier and with whom I shared two children. Sex was this sticky thing for me that I felt I had to do because it's what people in love and in marriage did. It was always with resistance, with hesitation, but I wasn't normal, our marriage wasn't normal, if we didn't at least have sex once a month. "Unsexed" traces the role that my two mothers, a biological stay-at-home mom turned prostitute and an adoptive mother who gave me a roof, meals, and schooling but nothing akin to love or affection. The book was meant to help me trace my understanding of sex so I could figure out what my issues were, where they came from, and how far into asexuality or unsexedness they went.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
Reading Rainbow means reading books and stories with diverse characters about diverse experiences. I teach women's and gender studies at my college, so when my son came out, I wanted to expose all of us to his experiences since he was raised in a Catholic school and as a cis-boy. As an educator in higher education, I am fortunate to be able to assign work that requires students to read, write, and research issues relevant to their lives, and it is super gratifying to see my LGBTQ students thrive in my classroom even if it's more difficult to do so outside such an open learning spaces.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
A writer and a bibliophile, I found myself in literature when I was young, and this helped me understand myself as well as the complex and difficult adults who made decisions for me without my consent or voice. It's important that we all see ourselves in film, in literature, in essays, in picture books, in social media, and in music — or else, it feels like we have been erased from history, from existence. I am glad my son can be gay today, at a time when this website and other forms of media are representing him and normalizing LGBTQ lives. It is my hope that our country finds its democratic vein again and not move forward with more censorship than we have encountered in the last few years.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
It was during the pandemic when I began writing "Unsexed." My now ex-husband had been working in NY and coming home to us in NC only on the weekends, making it possible for us to ignore his politics and how it differed from mine and from my son's. But the pandemic brought him home permanently, and our dinners were enmeshed with fights. One fight in particular got physical between father and son, and I had to get in between then to tear them apart. Part of writing this book had to do with me exposing the toxicity of being married to a conservative man who voted against his gay son's and his daughter's rights with each vote. The fight between him and my son brought this to the center, and none of us could go on ignoring our differences or the rage and bullying we had lived under all these years, silencing ourselves so that we wouldn't fuel his storm. In writing this book, I was able to come face-to-face with how this marriage was actually hurting my children, and it gave me the courage to get out of it for good.
What can fans expect from your book?
My book has been described as raw, unflinchingly honest, and brave. I love these descriptions because this is the kind of writer I always wanted to be. I think that writers owe the world a space for work that challenges the status quo and exposes the ills of society. This is why I write, and this is also how I teach. My classes invite students to write about their experiences with racism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, classism, and sexism. Because my son is gay, I am aware of my students and the secrets and pains they hide behind smiles. This used to be my son. He came alive when he had an English teacher that cheered for him when he wrote about his experiences with homophobia, and I wanted to be that kind of teacher. I want my students to have a voice and to use that voice because it is their right to speak their stories out loud.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
I am writing a book about my first foray into dating after 50 and about how different sex is for me at this time and age in my life. There are no pressures to conform, no notions of being a slut or a whore, tags that had been attached to me all my life simultaneously. Sex at 50 is liberating and exhilarating. I still have many sex hangups that I continue to explore through my writing and therapy, but overall, I am defining myself and my sexuality outside the constraints of marriage and the complexities of being the daughter of both a prostitute and a virgin.
