If you’re like most people (and who isn’t?) there’s nothing you like more than a summer day with a good read. A soft, summer breeze blowing wisps of your hair while the pages turn like calendar pages in a 1940s Preston Sturges movie.
Or you can turn them yourself.
This summer, the hottest read on everyone’s bestseller list is the new K.B. Kelton tome, Things We Shouldn't Do – a biting compilation of novellas that make tawdry one-night stands, paid online sex work, and debilitating bladder cancer seem fun!
Of course, the name Kelton is ubiquitous with irreverent late-night comedy, cheesy hit sitcoms and leftist Marxist politics…oops, we meant thoughtful political discourse. But in this new adult fiction masterpiece, K.B. gives Henry Miller and E.L. James a run for their soft-porn money.
“Things We Shouldn’t Do” follows three women in three stages of life – one in her twenties, one in her thirties, and one in her forties approaching the Big Five-Oh. Each woman loves men. Each woman loves s-e-x. And each woman makes certain, questionable “choices” in her love life that lead her down some pretty bumpy roads.
In today’s Celebrity Author Interview, More Perfect Union cohost Kevin Kelton sat down with the noted smut scribe at his favorite Georgetown, Texas breakfast joint, Matty's Waffles and Tits, for a far-reaching discussion about "their" writing (K.B.'s pronoun of choice) and "their" penis. "Their" answers to "our" penetrating questions may shock you…
MPU: Good morning.
KB: Well, that wasn’t much of a penetrating question.
MPU: You’re right, My bad. So tell us, with all your success in the lighter fare of television sketch comedy and sitcoms, what made you want to expand to writing serious, adult content that some readers might even call "erotic?"
KB: It’s something I always wanted to try?
MPU: Making readers think?
KB: No, the stuff in the book – that's what I wanted to try – online exhibitionism, getting paid for sex, threesomes. Y’know, stuff a nerd like me never gets to do in real life. So I took all my darkest, kinkiest fantasies and let other people live them out through my words. I figure, let them deal with the guilt and the STDs. I struggle enough with writers’ block.
MPU: Fair enough, K.B. But why a book with three female lead characters?
KB: Uhhhhh….
MPU: I mean, even with the androgynous “K.B.” pseudonym and the they/their pronouns, it’s clear you’re a man. You have a penis. I’m looking right at it.
KB: Uhhhhh….
MPU: So what gives a privileged white man like yourself the right to write a romance novel about female characters of varying ethnicities? Isn’t that illegal or something?
KB: Well first of all, they are three cisgender women and the book is about their sex lives. So there’s clearly some men in there, too. Frankly, I think the male characters are just as flawed, flaky and interesting as the women who "board the beef bus" with them. ‘Cause, believe me, none of those ladies are Rosa Parks.
MPU: Interesting metaphor. What does it mean?
KB: Not a clue.
MPU: That said, what allows you to write in the voice of a young woman? Isn’t that appropriation?
KB: Of course it’s appropriate.
MPU: No, I said “appropriation.” You know, cultural appropriation? Like stealing another gender’s agency?
KB: Oh. No, not really. I don’t think I wrote it in a woman’s voice. The book is written third-person omniscient. So it’s really the voice in my head making shit up. Y’know…fiction?
MPU: Third-person omniscient? All-seeing, all-knowing…like God. So you think you’re qualified to write in the voice of God?
KB: Uhhhhh…
MPU: Look, why don’t you just tell us what the book is about, and we’ll decide how perversely inappropriate it is.
KB: Fine, nothing loaded about that question.
MPU: As I understand it, the first story is about a professional ice dancer who becomes a prostitute. How much of that is autobiographical?
KB: All of it.
MPU: Really? Hm. None of it was fictionalized?
KB: Well, maybe the part about getting paid for sex. That never happened to me. But one day I was thinking, what would happen if Nancy Kerrigan or Michelle Kwan had become a hooker? Actually, I ask myself the same question about every celebrity – what would’ve happened if they had become a prostitute instead. The answers about Martha Stewart and Jared Kushner would astound you.
MPU: Fair enough. In your second novella, a pretty, shy rental car attendant becomes famous on an OnlyFans style website. Have you ever appeared nude on OnlyFans?
KB: Yes.
MPU: Oh really?! I’d love to see your work sometime. What’s your screen handle?
KB: Miss Colleen Dewhurst.
MPU: Interesting. Wasn’t that the actress who play Diane Keaton’s mother in “Annie Hall"?
KB: “Play”? You mean that wasn’t a documentary?
MPU: No.
KB: Then why was Alvy always talking to camera?
MPU: Hey, I’m the one who’s supposed to be asking the questions.
KB: Sorry.
MPU: So, Colleen, let’s talk about the book’s longest and most serious story. In it, without giving too much away, a married man develops cancer…
KB: That’s kinda giving it away.
MPU: …and can no longer perform in the bedroom.
KB: That’s giving a lot of it away!
MPU: It’s well-known by very few people that you had kidney and bladder cancer. Did those things happen to you?
KB: No, I can still perform in the bedroom. Karaoke, standup comedy, river-dancing…I do it all.
MPU: So you've still got your mojo. Glad to put that Twitterverse rumor to bed. Lastly…
KB: ...and, hopefully, leastly...
MPU: …one of your characters is a gorgeous 46-year-old woman of Korean heritage who was sexually abused as a child by her cousin. How did you get into her head?
KB: The cultural appropriation question again? Look, Barry Morrow and Ron Bass wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Rain Man” without being autistic. J.K. Rowling wrote seven Harry Potter books without ever spending a day as a wizard or a pre-pubescent boy. I write about people I think are interesting. I put them in situations I think would be interesting. “Things We Should’t Do” is not a textbook; it’s a weird author’s weird fantasies about what life might be like as other people. That’s what writers do. I made a lot of money doing that on network TV shows. Now I do it for pennies on my computer.
So, if you really want to accuse me of cultural appropriation, knock me for pretending I’m a great American author. I’m a silly guy who tells silly stories to amuse myself and my friends. Now, if you don’t mind, I have better things to do with my time. (KELTON PAUSES FOR A LONG SILENT MOMENT) You ever wonder what would’ve happened if J.K. Rowling had become a hooker?
NOTE: "Things We Shouldn't Do" - a serious, cynical look at love and sex in the 21st century - is available for sale on Amazon and wherever not-so-fine books are sold.
