Bedtime Stories

Knocking boots. Shaking sheets. Getting laid. The euphemisms for sex are endless. Indeed, even when the business is funny, we tend to avoid discussing it directly. Just think of television shows and movies: so often the promise of intercourse is followed by a door closing, a camera panning away, a fade to black. Such widespread reticence can lead to feelings of shame and embarrassment over something that is, at the end of the day, completely ordinary. Is it possible to immodestly love the making of love?

Russell Smith addresses this very question with the anthology Secret Sex. The novelist and editor has gathered twenty-four writers, including Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, Heather O’Neill, Susan Swan, Drew Hayden Taylor, and Michael Winter, to write about sex — anonymously. If given such an opportunity, Smith wonders in the book’s introduction, “would they write more explicitly, more openly?” After all, “their parents and their exes and Twitter would not be able...