Summer, smut, and...grandmas?

Girls will be girls, no matter their age ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Photo courtesy of Madeline Edwards via Dupe.

My grandmother was a voracious reader. When she wasn’t doing the crossword or sewing something, she could be found with a book in her hand. Right up until she died, I remember her making her way though the list of Pulitzer Prize and John Newbery Medal winners like the dutiful former teacher and librarian she was. Our family cabin on the Hood Canal was a favorite place of hers to read. She’d sit out on the porch – half in sunlight, half in shade – in one of the old aluminum lawn chairs and read for as long as she could.

Even after she was gone, the books she read at the cabin remained. I never paid much attention to them (I was too busy tracking sand and saltwater into the house from my trips to and from the beach), until late high school. In true PNW fashion, it was a rainy Memorial Day weekend and my friend and I were bored without the ability to swim or suntan. It was before we had smartphones or reliable cell service, so we were left just talking to each other or staring at the wall. In my wall-staring, my eyes found my grandmother’s books. They were still where they always were, lined on top of a rickety green dresser under the windowsill, but I was seeing them for the first time. Out of curiosity, I plucked one from the lineup. It was white with a pink rose on the cover, it’s pages browning from its years in the sunlight. In reading the description on the back, I realized it was a romance novel.

My friend and I flipped through it, seeking out all the explicit scenes. It was the first time I’d seen a real romance novel, an adult romance novel. Until that point, the spiciest thing I’d ever read was Twilight, which as we all know, was written by a Mormon. Here was the entertainment we’d been looking for. We delighted in forcing the other to read the passages, giggling hysterically and not at all covertly.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked from the kitchen, irritated by the growing racket.

“Reading one of Grandma’s books,” I replied. “And to think I thought she only read classics!”

It really was quite out of character, as far as I was concerned. I had known my grandmother to be a woman of dignity – of tradition – one who’d once admonished me, a seven-year-old, for applying my chapstick at the dinner table (“Ladies never put on makeup in public, they go to the powder room!”). For all I knew, she only read the world’s finest literature. Perhaps it should have disgusted me, the thought of my grandmother reading words like “pulsing” and “throbbing,” but I instead found it hilarious. There she had been, an eighty-something-year-old, secretly relishing in grocery store smut while correcting everyone else’s grammar. It looks like she wasn’t a lady after all, she was a human.

My grandmother’s reading habits are even more hilarious to me when I consider her staunch Catholicism. Growing up, I heard stories of how they’d sit in church, my grandmother on one end of the pew, my grandfather on the other, and all four kids in between. Grandpa, a convert for Gram’s sake, would goof off to pass the time. He’d get all four kids to giggle, causing my grandma to lean forward and shoot him a pointed look, which only made them all laugh harder.

It’s funny because Catholicism is why I’d stayed away from smut for so long. I’d been shamed into thinking sexuality was a sin. It’s why books like Twilight spoke to me, they were just as steeped in repression as I was. When Fifty Shades of Grey came out while I was in college and I heard it was Twilight fan fiction, I went right to the bookstore to buy it. I started it on a rare summer weekend I wasn’t at the cabin, posting up on a lawn chair in the sunniest spot in the yard. A friend had warned me that it wasn’t what I thought it was, and unsure of what she meant (and not asking for clarification), I proceeded anyway. I got about a quarter of the way through before I realized she was right. Horrified, I marched back down to the bookstore and returned it (you know, like how God would have wanted me to).

Somehow I’d forgotten that even my holier-than-thou grandmother couldn’t resist the lure of the devil’s dime novel. I’d yet to learn that smut is a pretty natural thing and how she just proves that point. It’s true, not all smut is created equal and a lot of it isn’t written to the highest of calibers, but it’s also true that it’s entertaining – that it scratches some sort of itch in our reptilian brains. Despite becoming much more mainstream since my grandma’s day, it still has an illicit nature to it that makes it all the more fun. And what makes for a better beach read than something fun?

I love that my grandma wasn’t repressed enough to resist a raunchy read, though I doubt she let herself discuss it with anyone (Catholic guilt likely still won there). For me, that’s part of the experience. In fact, when my friends and I go on vacation, we read the same book and wait to see who gets to the spicy parts first. We also sometimes hand the book to one of our husbands and convince them to read a section out loud. This is arguably the most fun of all, because like my early college self and Fifty Shades, they never realize what they’re reading until it’s too late.

Reading smut – aloud and in public, no less – might not be “ladylike” by my grandmother’s standards, but it strikes me as peak girlhood. After all, it’s largely written by women for women. And although we still face a number of barriers as a gender, the fact that it’s something we can openly talk about shows how far we’ve come. She may be horrified on the surface, but deep down, I think Grandma would approve of that progress.