An adult film legend makes you carbonara while you watch from the couch. A distant uncle alone on his cot gives you immunity. Walt Whitman, reclining in the grass, offers - and rescinds - closure. A week on the ward is a glimpse into sanity. The loveliest things can happen in bed. Novelist and essayist Brian Bouldrey, in this new collection of essays, looks at all the things that happen, and don't happen, in the sack. A lifetime of experience generated these appreciations, thoughts, rants, eulogies, and meditations, all part of a conversational book suitable for any bedroom. From memories of friends we have lost to observations about what we have gained, Bouldrey ranges far over the world of travel, love, culture, art, sex, and books - and brings them straight to your nightstand.
Good in Bed returns to many of Bouldrey's ongoing preoccupations, not just sex and religion, but travel, too, and personal challenge, and the vicissitudes of friendship and culture. Always deeply felt, often funny, sometimes uplifting, and never dull, Bouldrey's book wants to show us both the striking differences among us, and also, our beautiful sameness. A ReQueered Tales Original Publication.
"Bouldrey's Good in Bed takes the three things you ought never talk about at a party - sex, politics, and religion - and adds a whole new list of topics, like drugs, and madness, and poetry, and poppers, and opera. And The Dirty Sanchez. The reader, like the writer, will find themselves quick to laughing and slowly giving in to a good cry or an even better fit of anger. Every story here is a love story, and every love story has adventure and betrayal, which makes love pretty queer, pretty wild - Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat." - Susie Bright, aka Susie Sexpert, the Best American Erotica series
"Brian Bouldrey has traveled further than most - and on foot, survived worse - and lost more, knows the Saints of his religion as only a true devil can, knows the dirtiest words, is suspicious of nostalgia, French men, our pathological need to "relate," Bouldrey's own preference being - and it's the right preference - to remember. Good In Bed is brilliant, funny, deeply moving and historic. Bouldrey at his verve-filled best." - John Bresland, Zero Station and Other Essays
"Flip, hilarious, dead-on observant, mordant, and finally amazingly honest and sad. Good in Bed is an unexpected gift from a talented novelist. It's as delicious as tasting assorted chocolate bon-bons from a heart shaped velvet carton, while reading movie magazines and listening to the Go-Go's." - Felice Picano, Like People in History
"Bouldrey's Good in Bed is a delight. This is the sort of book that you never want to finish - you get to the last fifty pages and you want it to go on and on. There are so many trips to take with Brian, on the page and in the world, and you will be accompanied by that delightful, curious, and hilarious mind." - Julia Sweeney, God Said Ha!