Marina DelVecchio joins the Spotlight this week to chat about her latest memoir, Unsexed
Author Name: Marina DelVecchio
Book Title: Unsexed: Memoirs of a Prostitute’s Daughter
Book Genre: Memoir
Release Date: July 16, 2024
Publisher: She Writes Press
Welcome Marina! Please tell us a bit about your book.
Unsexed is a memoir that chronicles one woman’s relationship with her body and sexuality as she attempts to understand the politics of trauma and how it has inscribed itself onto her body. It’s also about generational abuse and how it manifests in women’s bodies and the relationships they have with their partners and children.
What drew you to write a memoir about this experience? What made you want to tell this particular story? What do you hope readers will gain or learn from reading about your experience?
I have always written out of a need to examine my trauma and childhood experiences. In this book, I was trying to understand exactly what it was that kept me in my marriage even though I had not had sex with my husband for over ten years. I needed to understand how my ideas about sex and relationships came to be that I was willing to stay with a man who started out loving me but continued to deride me verbally, often in front of our kids. The book laid it all out for me, and once it was on paper, I had to make some very hard decisions about my life and the life I was exposing my children to.
I hope that women read my work because they want to know more about the universality of women’s attitudes toward sex and femininity and how patriarchy contributes to it. I hope women with PTSD find their trauma in my work and feel less alone, less isolated in their pain. I want young women between the ages of 17 and 28 to read my work and be inspired by it, learn from it, and use it as a model for female agency in the same way I used my female heroines from the past to inspire and teach me about what it means to be a woman in my light, not in the dark shadows of society. I also hope men read my work so they can understand what it means to be a woman who navigates a society that privileges men and their wants, needs, and potential.
What was your research process like for Unsexed?
Since it is a memoir, I just wrote from memory, super focused on my body and how it carried trauma. I didn’t conduct any research other than trying to articulate the symptoms of PTSD, how they showed up in my body, and how each symptom impacted the choices I made for me and my children.
From your perspective, what’s the hardest thing about writing and researching? And what do you love most about it?
Although I’ve written academic and research-based work, I favor memoir and essay writing because I only have to dig into myself for the answers I seek. That said, the part of research I enjoy the most is finding articles that reflect my experiences though a theoretical lens — I find these in psychology and feminist theory most often. Being able to intelligently articulate — or name — the experiences I have is quite liberating because then I don’t feel like an anomaly. There’s a term for it, a name and a reason.
What’s capturing your imagination these days outside of reading and writing?
Travel. I really want to travel abroad, but financially, I can’t do it. I’m a full-time college instructor with two side hustles and still don’t make enough to travel — but one day I will. Staying local, I really want to continue my post-divorce bucket list from last summer: I got a tattoo, drove to Utah and back again from Chicago, stopped at all the touristy places, tried a variety of ice cream flavors outside of my hot fudge sundae addiction, paddle-boarded, tried axe-throwing, and bought myself a mustang convertible. This year, I will be driving north to New York to visit friends, read a whole bunch of books from my bookshelves, apply for jobs, return to school for a mental health counseling degree, and kayak.
Any new writing projects in the works?
I am editing my next book, As You Lay Dying, about a woman who visits her estranged mother in the hospital. The mother was hard and cold, and now that she is in a coma, the woman sits beside her and tells her all that she has overcome in having her as a mother. It’s fiction, but it’s also based on my relationship with my adoptive mother.
What was the last book you read? What did you think of it?
The last book I read was Lessons in Chemistry, and I loved it because of its feminist themes. I teach women’s studies from an intersectional feminist framework, and this book resonated with past and current tides of American sexism.
Where can readers find you?
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marina.delvecchio/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Marinagraphy/
X: https://twitter.com/MarinaDelV5375
Website: https://marinadelvecchio.com/
Thank you Marina! Unsexed is OUT NOW.
Unsexed
Unsexed examines the role that sex plays in the life of one woman with two mothers who introduce her to polarized frameworks of female sexuality.
Born in Greece to a violent prostitute and then adopted by a cold and unloving virgin from New York, Marina inherits a sexual identity steeped in fear and shame–one that, as she grows older and becomes a wife and mother, trickles into her marriage and the parenting of her children. Without the tools needed to understand her complex mothers or to unpack the lessons they taught her, Marina relies on self-erasure to survive relationships that silence and define her–until she finally becomes fed up with those old patterns and begins to stand in her own power.
A memoir that unearths the layered emotional and sexual lives of women and exemplifies the satisfaction that comes when they assert their voices and power, Unsexed speaks to millions of women who have different narratives but face similar struggles in reclaiming their voices, bodies, and sexuality.