Campus Sexpot: A Memoir (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction)
David Carkeet
She tipped her head sideways, her lips offering themselves to his. He remembered the fire those lips contained, the promise her kiss held. . . . In 1962 David Carkeet's drowsy hometown of Sonora, California, snapped awake at the news that it had inspired a smutty potboiler titled Campus Sexpot. Before leaving town on short notice, the novel's author had been an English teacher at the local high school, where Carkeet was a hormone-saturated sophomore. Leaving was a good idea, it turned out, for most of the characters in Campus Sexpot had been modeled after Sonora's citizens.
Carkeet uproariously recaptures his stunned, youthful reaction to the novel's sleazy take on his hometown. The innocent nowhere burg where he despaired of ever getting any "action" became, in the pages of Campus Sexpot, a sink of iniquity echoing with "animal cries of delight." Blood pounded, dams of passion broke, and marriages and careers—not to mention the basics of good writing—went straight to hell.
As Carkeet relates his own romantic fumblings to the novel's clumsy twists and turns, he also evokes the urgently hushed atmosphere in which the book circulated among friends and neighbors. Eventually, Carkeet stumbles into adulthood, where he discovers a truer definition of manhood than the one in the pages of the pulp fiction of his youth. A wry look at middle-class sexual mores and a witty appreciation of the art of the hack novel, Carkeet's memoir is, above all, a poignant and hilarious coming-of-age story sure to revive our own bittersweet teenage memories.
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About David Carkeet
Reviews for Campus Sexpot: A Memoir (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction)
Suzannah Lessard
author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family
Hilarious, bizarre, intricate, poignant, piercing, startlingly honest, eyepoppingly funny, and ultimately, to the reader's surprise and delight, a book not about lust but very much about love, mysterious and miraculous. A riveting book.
Brian Doyle
author of Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies
Carkeet has a well-earned reputation as one of the funniest and most entertaining comic writers working today. In Campus Sexpot, his first memoir, Carkeet turns his attention to small-town America, to the strangeness and hilarity of SEX, and to the fascinating and beautifully observed contradictions that lie at the center of family life. Campus Sexpot is an addictive joy to read.
John Dalton
author of Heaven Lake
A fun read that feels a lot more like a novel than the memoir that it is.
Blue Ridge Business Journal [Carkeet] knows to milk a joke and then fix without flinching on the sad human dramas fueling them.
East Bay Express Campus Sexpot is a hilarious tour through the embarrassment of adolescence and small-town families. For female readers, it's also an education on American boyhood.
J. Gordon
Nighttimes
[A] saucy, fanciful slice of creative nonfiction . . . In a nimble narrative, Carkeet transforms the reading of his first smutty book into a shrimpy boy's sexual initiation during the buttoned-up Kennedy years.
Publishers Weekly Memoirs are, by definition, unique in their content. But leave it to David Carkeet, former St. Louisan and novelist extraordinaire, to take the form a step further with his own inventive coming-of-age story. . . . Campus Sexpot does not disappoint.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch