What We Can Learn About Book Coaching From a Sex Educator
A discussion of Emily Nagoski's new book, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections
Pretty click-bait-y post title, isn’t it?
That’s not why I thought of it. I thought of it because I have just finished reading Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connection by Emily Nagoski and I am a super fan of this book. In addition to the sex part, it is filled with important lessons on a wide variety of topics that have nothing to do with sex, including friendship, parenting, family relationships, being a human, and (because I see the world the way I see the world), writing, and book coaching.
I want to share some of the relevant lessons today—and on Friday, I’m going to share some more.
Why This Book?
Before I get to the lessons from the book itself, I want to talk about why I purchased this book. It fell under the 3-second rule that sometimes governs my reading—meaning I decided in about 3 seconds to buy it and to put it at the top of my TBR pile based on a.) the author’s reputation and b.) the title/concept.
I read Nagoski’s last book, the one she wrote with her sister, called Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle after hearing Brene Brown interview the authors on Brown’s podcast.
Burnout was a New York Times bestseller, and it quickly became one of my most recommended books—right up there with The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp and Playing Big by Tara Mohr. It’s a book I recommend to writers, and book coaches, and friends, and strangers. It helped me understand myself and my behaviors and feelings, plus it’s readable, well-organized, well-researched, and funny. It’s a fabulous book.
When I mentioned Burnout to my daughter, she told me how much she had enjoyed Emily Nagoski’s first book, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, which was also a New York Times bestseller. I had never heard of the book and made a mental note to put it on my TBR pile, but as so often happens, I never did.
A year or so later, I saw this headline in the New York Times:
She Wrote a Best Seller on Women’s Sex Lives. Then Her Own Fell Apart
My friend
once asked me what kinds of headlines I ALWAYS stop and click on—and this is one of those categories for me: stories about a professional who has trouble with their professional area of expertise. Think of books like Lori Gottlieb’s memoir, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone or Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. I love getting a glimpse of the inside story and also appreciate the vulnerability of what it means to be an expert who is not always clear and confident, and the whole idea of mastery and authority. So I clicked on that headline and saw that this was a review of Nagoski’s new book.I am about to celebrate my 35th wedding anniversary and consider my good and happy marriage to be among my greatest accomplishments, so a book about maintaining long-term connections of all kinds is of great interest to me.
So three seconds after reading that headline, I bought Come Together.
Okay, so now onto Lesson Set #1. Lesson Set #2 is about what this book has to offer writers and book coaches. That’s coming on Friday.
Lesson Set #1: Why Do I Think This Book Is So Good?
Asking why you think a particular book is good is a critical question for a book coach to ask.
We have to be able to define excellence for our writers and to articulate it. These skills allow us to help our writers define what excellence means to them in their own work, and to help them achieve it. Breaking down a book you consider excellent is always a great exercise. It’s asking similar questions that we ask in the Blueprint process, but we’re doing it after the fact rather than before the writer starts to write.
Here is my list of things that make Come Together so good.
A crystal clear sense of the audience. In her first book on sex, Nagoski was speaking specifically to women. In this book, she is speaking to people in committed partnerships, and her view of what that means is expansive. She invites readers to leave who don’t agree with her decision to tell the stories of queer, non-binary, not monogamous, not heterosexual couples. Nagoski is doing what Priya Parker suggests we do in (the also excellent) The Art of Gathering, and that is to make an inclusive container for the people who want what we are offering by deliberately excluding the people who don’t.
Nagoski is also well aware that some of the partners of the readers of this book might not be game to accept her advice or read her book, and she addresses that reality very directly. She has a deep understanding of who she is writing for and how her advice is likely to land not just in their hearts and minds, but in their households. A book about the connection between partners needs the buy-in of all the partners.
A crystal clear point. Nagoski’s point is that good sex is about pleasure not desire– and pleasure is about learning how to be comfortable in your own skin, how to communicate, and how to feel (tying directly into the Burnout book). She speaks at length about how so many of our cultural teachings around sex teach us the opposite, and as a parent, a grandparent, and a person raised during the time of very awkward, stilted school-based sex education classes, it was eye-opening. There was a “sex lecture” I used to repeatedly give to my girls when they were teenagers living under our roof that I find cringe-worthy today; I have since had to apologize to them. After reading this book, I think I may need to apologize again.
A strong point of view. The marketing teacher Tad Hargrave at Marketingforhippies.com uses this term “point of view” to describe the lens through which you (and your business) see the world. Dallas Travers, the business coach, uses the term “stance” to mean something similar. A good book (and a good business) has to stand for something. It has to have strong point of view. It’s not enough to make a point, you have to believe it—and you have to embody it, and live it, and let it color everything you make for your audience. Nagoski has some thoughts about the way we raise our children to take on particular roles in the sexual realm. She is mad and she is on a mission to change it. It’s very rare to read someone on a mission who is not being preachy or pedandantic. It takes a lot of skill to write like that.
Voice, voice, voice! What even IS voice? It’s so hard to pin down — but when you see it, or hear it, you know you are in its presence. Nagoski’s writing is so clearly HER. She doesn’t seem to be trying to impress or dazzle anyone, or to sound erudite; she has a PhD and is a self-proclaimed data geek, so she easily could take on that tone, I’m sure. Instead, she comes across as being fully present on the page, as being wholly who she is. It feels as if she is giving something of herself in these pages.
Other recent nonfiction books I’ve read that have this same quality include Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, the aforementioned The Art of Gathering , and Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The thing that is keeping me from moving forward on a nonfiction book I want to write is that I know I don’t yet have this quality. I also don’t have any of the other Blueprint questions pinned down. They all relate. But I can’t quite find my voice. It matters so much.
Mastery of the material. There are some excellent frameworks and metaphors in this book that are easy to understand and use. I have worked with so many nonfiction book writers who *think* they have this part dialed in, but don’t. It’s more difficult than it seems to present an elegant and useable framework or metaphor. Nagoski presents her ideas with an authority that stems from a great deal of real-life experience in helping people use her frameworks. As a reader, you know you are in the hands of a pro. You trust her—and if the trust is not there, you lose your reader.
A sense of humor. It’s a funny book! Nagoski is not only wise, she is witty and she has fun with words and ideas, and with her readers. Some of the funniest parts of the book are in Appendix 1, entitled Ten “But Emily!” Questions, where she addresses the objections to her advice she has no doubt heart many times. It’s funny because she knows her audience and her point, she has mastery of her material, she has a point of view, and she is writing in a unique and specific voice. In other words, all the things that make this book good ping against each other and create a holistic and immersive experience.
On Friday, I’ll dig into the lessons I found in this book that can help us as writers and coaches.
Sex and writing have one thing in common. Everyone thinks they know how to do it : ) Thanks Jennie will look forward to the lessons you found for writers.