Watch Highlights from “Words of Desire”

“I’m always looking for something slightly weird about a sexual encounter,” the fiction writer Emma Cline told New Yorker subscribers this week. Cline, the author of three books and several short stories that have appeared in the magazine, was speaking not about herself but about her plots, which have included figures reminiscent of Harvey Weinstein and examine, at times, the interaction between physical intimacy and power.

Cline was reflecting during “Words of Desire,” the latest installment of The New Yorker Live, the magazine’s monthly digital event series. Joined on the virtual stage by the writers Garth Greenwell and Ottessa Moshfegh, Cline was considering sex in its many literary iterations, along with its thematic bedfellows: trust and betrayal, convention and deviance, physicality and feeling. The conversation, moderated by the New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz, explored how sex is portrayed persuasively or inadequately, whether as a plot device or as a clue to character. “Great sex writing uses sex as a way to delve into the body, but also to delve into psychology, also to delve into interpersonal relationships, and then also to delve into context and into history,” Greenwell, who has set a number of his fictional sex scenes in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, said.

As Schwartz noted early in the conversation, the speakers themselves represented the ways that writing about sex—a pursuit once dominated primarily by male, straight perspectives—has changed. But while the types of sexual relationships described in literature have diversified, Moshfegh, whose stories are often dark and sardonic, cautioned that modes of informal censorship may simply have taken on new forms. “You have to be deviant in the sanctioned ways that social-media politics have deemed appropriate,” she said.

In the clip above, you can view highlights of the discussion, including why portraying sex as an act of happiness can present a literary challenge. Subscribers to The New Yorker can watch the entire conversation, and all previous installments of The New Yorker Live, at newyorker.com/live. Check the page in the weeks ahead for details about upcoming events, and subscribe to gain unlimited access.