Ahead of the February 11 Residence 11 Desire Summit on Sex and Relationships (get tickets here!), we’re conducting a series of livestream interviews with Summit speakers. You can watch them live or after the fact on our YouTube channel, Facebook page or Twitter account, and ask questions for our interviewees.
Watch our interview between Editor-in-Chief Rachel Kramer Bussel and writer Taylor Hahn, author of the novel The Lifestyle and the romance novella, The Wedding, the Winery, and Will. They discussed how Taylor wrote her first novel while working full-time as a lawyer, her research into the swinging community, and writing respectfully about swingers. Taylor will be joined by author Allison Moon at Desire Summit for a talk on Writing Alternative Sexuality in Fiction.
On writing her first novel, The Lifestyle, while working as a lawyer:
I was motivated, to be honest, by dislike of my job. I was as a litigator at a firm in New York, and I was working crazy hours. I was working on cases that were, in the financial realm, and it just wasn’t really my personality; I wasn’t that interested in it.
I felt like writing was a passion that I’d always had. So I kind of viewed it as a way out, and I found that very motivating. I would write in all of my free time; that was a big commitment. I can’t emphasize enough how difficult that was; it got to the point where I said to my husband, and my friends, I can’t have any social life until I’m done with this book. Because I don’t have enough time, there aren’t enough hours in the day, for me to work, be social, and finish this novel.
Finishing the novel was the most important thing to me. So I would pretty much write all weekend. I wouldn’t make any plans. That would just be my number one priority. Of course, that did not happen every weekend, because life gets in the way. So there were times that I would take a significant period away from it, but I always came back because it was always really important to me. So it took about three years for me to finish a draft that was good enough to start querying, and then the query process took about half a year. The book came out a year and a half after that. It was a five years start to finish process.
On doing research into the swinging community:
I did most of my research online. It’s funny, because I started this novel in 2018 but by the time I was writing the draft, as it currently is, it was actually March of 2020, because I was working as a lawyer up until [that time], and then I took a little bit of a break. That’s when I really worked on this novel. So I didn’t go anywhere. I don’t think anyone was really going anywhere.
I didn’t go to any clubs in person, I did most of my research online. And there’s a lot out there. I was really thankful for the people who are very open about their experiences online. There are a lot of blogs, where people will write about their experiences, and a lot of personal essays that I found incredibly helpful.
But what I found the most useful was actually websites that bring together the swinging community. People are very generous with their advice. They will write to other people who are interested in going to a party for the first time, but they’re nervous, and they don’t know what to expect. They’ll explain what to expect, and what generally happens, and also provide a lot of guidance.
That was incredibly useful. I think that people in real life probably find it very useful as well. But I found it very useful as a writer. There’s a scene in the book where one of the more experienced swingers is offering to be a mentor to the to the newbies, and he provides a lot of rules. For example, he says that you shouldn’t keep secrets between you and your partner, that that’s just going to breed a lot of jealousy. It’s very important to be open about what you expect of your partner in the experience, and what you are willing to do, and then what you’ve actually done so that there’s no there’s no secrets between the people that are joining the experience together. So that’s just one example.
But I found those online communities to be really helpful. I also watched some videos. There was a short lived reality show on AMC, I think called Neighbors with Benefits. It was about this couple that lived in kind of suburban Ohio, and they were in the lifestyle. It followed them through their journey and they were very open about it. I thought that was really, really interesting.
I pretty much read everything I could get my hands on. There was also a counselor I found, I think she’s based out of Dallas, and she specializes in helping couples navigate this experience. She had written on her website a lot about what she tells the couples. It was very cerebral. She talked about how it helped, in her experience, couples to build a lot of trust between each other, which wasn’t necessarily intuitive to me.
In the beginning, I think I felt more like there was the potential for jealousy. So it might create trust issues. But she wrote the opposite, that she felt that setting expectations for your partner, and then having your partner respect those boundaries, was a trust building exercise. So everything that I read really opened my eyes to the experience, and it allowed me to approach this novel from a much more informed perspective.
On reader reactions to a novel about swinging:
I found the reactions from some people to be not surprising, but disappointing. One reader called the main character a whore, and that just gutted me because that was the complete opposite of what I was trying to accomplish. I was trying to empower this main character to explore sides of herself that she had never explored before, and not just in the bedroom, not just sex, but what she really wanted out of life.
Swinging was kind of a vehicle for her to do that. Because for the very first time, she was in an environment where she could pursue what she wanted, without being made to feel embarrassed. It caused her to look at the rest of her life and say, okay, maybe I actually haven’t ever explored what I really wanted in my life. So to have a reaction where someone called her a whore, it felt sad to me. It felt like you’re kind of missing the point. But that wasn’t the case for everybody. I think a lot of people enjoyed reading about this lifestyle that they probably hadn’t thought that much about or had only mocked. So it was very mixed.
On a Goodreads review by a swinger in the lifestyle:
I actually saw the best review, my favorite one I ever got, was this woman wrote that she enjoyed the novel [and] she thought it was accurate and funny, but she was in the lifestyle, and the novel was not as juicy as her real life experiences. And I think that’s pretty accurate, because this is a mainstream novel, and I wanted everybody to feel comfortable picking it up. So there is sex in the novel, but it’s not just one sex scene after another. There’s issues of friendship and there’s a lot outside the bedroom. I guess I could put it that way.
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About the Desire Summit: The Residence 11 Desire Summit, sponsored by sex toy companies FUN FACTORY and Blush, intimate audio platform BLOOM, romance novel publisher Avon Books, and yoga teacher training company Ganja Yoga, will feature extensive educational sessions with over 20 diverse authors and subject matter experts across psychology, physical intimacy, technology innovation, sexual health, music and narrative storytelling. Speakers include writer Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, author of The Sex Lives of African Women, polyamory expert Kevin Patterson, author of Love’s Not Color Blind, sex educator and dating expert Erin Tillman, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling romance author and TikTok favorite Sierra Simone (Priest, American Queen), Mia Hopkins (author of Tanked, one of The New York Times’ best 2022 romances, romance novelist Suzanne Park (The Do Over, The Christmas Clash), and Taylor Hahn, author of swinging novel The Lifestyle, among others. Keynote speakers will be intimacy coach Zoë Kors, author of Radical Intimacy: Cultivate the Deeply Connected Relationships You Desire and Deserve, speaking on 6 Questions That Will Get You Instantly Connected to Anyone, and sex educator Dirty Lola, who appeared as a sexpert on Netflix’s The Principles of Pleasure, speaking on The State of Modern Dating. Get tickets here for the Desire Summit.