Adrian colesberry doesn’t necessarily want you to have sex with him.
This may be surprising given the title of his debut book, “How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry.” But it’s important to note that Adrian is, in fact, married.
The book reveals the details of his relationships with the 11 women Colesberry has slept with — from the First One, to the Wife (now ex-wife), to the Great One, to the Last One (his current wife of two years). It is in manual form with anecdotal footnotes explaining the origins of each sexual preference and hang-up.
“[Editor Patrick Mulligan] said ‘This needs to be much more postmodern. I don’t want women’s names; you need to make it a manual,’” Colesberry said. “After saying ‘Fuck’ about a thousand times, I decided to take the book back to the structure of ‘Pale Fire,’ a poem where the footnotes tell the story. He had me exchange women’s names for their titles, which I loved. It makes it seem archetypal; the women seem ennobled by it every time their name is mentioned.”
Originally, Colesberry hadn’t planned to mention his current wife at all and the current state of their relationship was left out of the book. In fact, she had asked him not to.
“The Last One read all of it several times and helped get the publication going,” Colesberry said. “It was hilarious; she’d read about some lover I had and she’d say, ‘I’m either going to be mad or really horny when you get home — hurry up!’ You can’t help but be jealous reading about someone’s exploits. It’s going a lot better than the last marriage — she’s a great girl and I get laid a ton.”
But Colesberry’s larger purpose wasn’t to inform the world on his idiosyncratic sexual preferences.
“The absurdist purpose is to hand it out on a first date — read this, and come back next week,” he laughed. “But Adrian [in the book] morphs with the women he’s with. We adapt to the people in our lives. It’s a story of sexual becoming, on edge of the future facing outward. I’m not a fan of the identity business: you need to make a choice; you need to know who you are. Why do we need to know who we are? Why do we spend our days and nights forcing ourselves into a box when life is this leap into the future and you don’t know what the next moment holds, what the next relationship holds, and if you have this fixed idea of ‘I am this person,’ you’re going to miss it all, it’s all going to fly by you.”
Ultimately, it’s Colesberry’s attack on unreflective and prudish attitudes about sex that makes this book worthwhile. He started a Web site called HowToMakeLoveTo.com — which may be the most worthwhile idea to come out of his book — so that readers can make their own version of the book. It isn’t knowing how to have sex with Adrian Colesberry that’s important. It’s knowing what you would put in this book if you wrote it. It’s recognizing that it’s not just okay, but it’s essential that we find a way to talk about it.
“The only sex we want to talk about in our society is rape or child molestation — it’s absolutely sick,” he said. “It defies the experience of most men and women. It’s probably the best part of someone’s life. At the end of your life, some of the best parts have to be doing it, fantasizing about it, planning it, it’s delightful — and we’re so ungrateful! We pray to give thanks before meals; why don’t we pray before sex?”
What: Adrian Colsberry
When: Today, 7 p.m.
Where: BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd.
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