Exploring the Landscape of the Mind

Susan Minot likes to quote novelist and famous wit William Gass when discussing the challenge of her recently published novella, “Rapture,” which painstakingly describes an intimate act between two former lovers: “Words become embarrassed in the presence of sex.”

Words, it turns out, aren’t the only ones. A bespectacled woman of a certain age, who is among those who have gathered at Book Soup in West Hollywood recently to hear Minot read from “Rapture,” gingerly asks the author if all her books are about sex. Minot gently explains that the book, like her four previous works, is more about relationships than sex.

Earlier that day, relaxing poolside at the Santa Monica cottage of her sister, film producer Dinah Minot Hubley, Minot, 45, laughs when recounting the reactions she’s gotten to “Rapture.”

“There’s this little frisson around sex that people sort of blush about. When people discover that the book takes place during the time that two people are having sex, they get all sort of titillated and embarrassed and then they read it and they think, ‘Oh, well, it’s not really pornographic at all.’”

The book, you see, takes place during a single act of oral sex, but the bulk of the narrative is composed of the separate and, at times, conflicting recollections of Kay and Benjamin, the two parties involved.

“I chose that particular act because both the characters can be in a pensive state of mind. If they were doing a different kind of sex they wouldn’t be able to follow thoughts in this sort of drifting way. It’s really about what’s going on in their minds and how they’re trying to justify their behavior.”

The landscape of the mind is not unfamiliar territory for Minot. Her last novel, the critically acclaimed “Evening,” focused on the reverie and melancholy memories of a woman on her deathbed recalling her one true love. Even as “Evening” paired so well with Minot’s debut work, the autobiographical “Monkeys,” about the devastating effect of a mother’s death on a close-knit Massachusetts family, Minot agrees that “Rapture” continues the theme of her second book, “Lust and Other Stories.”

“It’s definitely a furthering. You could have taken some of those [‘Lust’] characters, who were in their 20s, and moved them up into their 30s and saw where they had not progressed” in terms of their approaches to romantic relationships.

And for Minot, writing about sex and, as the title indicates, sexual rapture was akin to writing about the physical pain of disease that she described in “Evening.”

“They’re both sort of unspeakable,” she says. “One of the impulses to write is to try to put words around something that’s out there in my experience, and the effort to do that, when you can nail [the experience] down, is very satisfying. It not only stops it in time but it, a little bit, transforms it. And that is one of the pleasures, one of the few pleasures, of writing.”

Minot (pronounced MY-nut), a lithe blond with a penchant for unfussy silver jewelry, was born to a large, well-to-do Boston family and was raised in Manchester, a seaside Massachusetts town. She attended the prestigious Concord Academy (Minot was one of schoolmate Caroline Kennedy’s bridesmaids) before studying creative writing at Brown and then, as a graduate student, at Columbia.

Although known as a thoroughly modern writer, Minot has some old-fashioned quirks. She not only writes her first drafts longhand, but she also uses a quill and dipped ink--”It sort of looks nicer, and it makes my words look better”--and then types the second and many other drafts (Minot will typically revise a book 10 or even 15 times) on a manual typewriter.

It’s a low-tech habit that suited her early bohemian writer’s life of working in borrowed apartments and cabins and beach bungalows. Minot, who has a 3-month-old daughter, lives on an island in Maine with the baby’s father--she has to take a ferry to the mainland to shop. She is working these days on a theatrical adaptation of “The Little Locksmith,” a 1943 memoir by Katharine Butler Hathaway that has recently been reissued by Feminist Press.

The play takes the form of a monologue told by Katharine, who was born in 1890. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine at age 5 and, as treatment, was strapped to a bed for 10 years. “The treatment worked for the most part, except that she didn’t grow beyond the size of a 10-year-old, but she ends up having this interesting literary life, she gets married and she has sort of a bohemian life in Paris,” Minot says.

In May, Minot’s first poetry collection, “Poems 4 a.m.,” will be published. “I’ve always written poems, and I had so many that were piled up, I started to feel like, ‘Maybe I can put some of these together,’ though I definitely was kind of intimidated by the poetry that I would read. You know, it’s very sophisticated, the poetry being written today. There’s a certain, I would say, obtuseness, to it, and most of the poems I write are very easily graspable.”

In fact, Minot has experimented in almost every genre of writing. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 film “Stealing Beauty” and has adapted her “Evening” for the screen (the project is currently with the New York film production company Hart Sharpe). She also writes travel stories, but her most recent nonfiction work was a harrowing account for the quarterly journal McSweeney’s of children in northern Uganda being kidnapped from their villages by rebel forces and conscripted.

Still, literary fiction remains her favorite outlet. “One of the reasons I write, and it’s not necessarily true with all writers, is to get away from myself.

And there is a kind of disappearance of the self when you’re really concentrating on whatever it is you’re working on. The less I recognize myself and the more it goes away from me, the more pleased I am.”