Camus’ classic reinvestigated; Thai writer’s reading list
Comedy writer produces book to help the darker sex understand women
The day before her first book was released, Ali Adler was sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, California. She was enjoying a latte and telling an anecdote about someone who had got an early peek but wouldn’t get to read her book for many years. That is, if he ever chooses to read it at all.
“My son saw the title and was like, ‘The F-word! Oh, my God!’,” Adler said.
She recalled telling him: “If you notice, it’s not all written out. I’m not using the bad word.”
(The full title is a coarser rendering of “How To Make Love To A Woman”.)
“I don’t think he’s ever heard me use that word aloud before,” said Adler, who has two children, ages 10 and seven. “I think one day they’ll meet their mother. They don’t really know who I am comedically.”
Who Adler is comedically, as well as professionally, is a long-time television writer and producer. Her credits include Family Guy, Chuck, Glee and The New Normal, of which she is a co-creator. Her next series, Supergirl, now in production, is set to debut on CBS in November.
While working on those shows, Adler spent countless hours in close quarters with the men who come up with our culture’s wacky-neighbour and date-from-hell jokes.
As one of the few women in the room (and one of fewer “out” lesbians), Adler had the chance to study the fumbling ways of the modern man up close. She listened to them confess their solitary vices, share stories about girlfriends and wives, and go into their intimate fantasies.
Eventually, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, she found herself wondering, what does a man want, as well as the related question, what does a man need to know? The answer, more or less, is the title of her book, published by Weinstein Books with the subtitle An Insider’s Guide To Love & Relationships.
In its pages, she provides big-sister advice to the sexually befuddled man. “Let’s be honest here: The vagina is an odd-looking thing,” she writes at one point. “I get it, and I own one. And allow me to tell you from experience: No two are alike. Vaginas are skin snowflakes.”
A bit later she offers what she calls the “Vagina Golden Rule”: “Do not do unto it as you would have done unto you. Everything about you is very different from a woman.”
Most of her counsel is decidedly old-fashioned: Listen to your partner; express your feelings; take her needs into consideration.
“When she told me she was going to write a book about sex, I wasn’t surprised,” her friend Jenni Konner, the producer of Girls, said by phone. “She has a sexy energy.”
Konner said she can see Adler’s sexual confidence in her manner: “She walks with her pelvis forward and shoulders back. She’s coming at you with her groin.”
Tall and chic, Adler, 48, was dressed in an FWK Engineered Garments top, with a blue Hermès scarf around her neck. She wore a thin red cabbala string on one wrist, but her most eye-catching accessory was the Jennifer Meyer-designed engagement ring given to her by her fiancée, Liz Brixius, a creator of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie.
“It’s obviously a beautiful piece of jewellery,” Adler said, but she was more pleased by “the fact that I can say in conversation with straight people and gay people I’m engaged.” (Adler’s children are from her previous longterm relationship with actress and talk show host Sara Gilbert.)
Most of her counsel is decidedly old-fashioned: Listen to your partner; express your feelings; take her needs into consideration
Adler is hardly the first writer to attempt to bridge the gender gap or offer between-the-sheets advice between the covers of a book. And she was not deterred by the fact that men these days search the internet for answers to their most intimate questions. “It’s Logan’s Run at this point,” she said. “I do think the machines sort of run us, and I don’t mean they don’t run me, too, because they do. I’m constantly checking and distracted. That’s the whole message of the book: How do we create connection?”
But why does she care to help the opposite sex? “She has a soft spot for the innocence of men when it comes to the matters of women,” Konner said.
Gilbert said: “There are things that are hard for men to come in knowing. It’s about listening and paying attention and talking more than you want.”
To Adler, her book goes deeper than what its title might indicate.
“I think the title is obviously something that is titillating and grabbing and gets you in,” she said, “but it’s really a book about emotions, relationships and connections.”