Jamie Quatro discusses her O. Henry prize-winning short story, “Sinkhole” – which, like much of her work, explores “the intersection of faith and sexuality in Judeo-Christian orthodoxy”:
“Sinkhole” is the only story I’ve ever written that came to me as a grand-scale, amorphous idea: to write a combination loss-of-virginity/exorcism scene in which neither person realized what was happening to the other. That was all I had. No image or character, not even a fragment of dialogue…
Growing up, I was flummoxed by the church’s strictures on sexual behavior on the one hand and the rampant scriptural use of sexual image and metaphor on the other. It seems there’s something inherently erotic about the way we’re supposed to think about God (bridegroom) and the way he thinks about us (the return of Christ as Consummation, the church as his Bride, etc). Many (most?) Christians might say the two are mutually exclusive—that sexual love is tied to flesh, love for God to spirit—but I’m convinced they’re very closely aligned.
This spring, Nina Schuyler reviewed Quatro’s collection, I Want To Show You More, and found these themes in abundance:
One of the most prevalent themes is adultery, which is sprinkled throughout the book through a series of stories. The collection opens with “Caught Up,” in which the narrator reveals her affair to her mother. The narrator has spent ten months talking daily to her lover on the phone. The affair never is consummated, but in her mother’s view, it might as well have: “It’s all the same in God’s eyes,” says her mother.
Throughout, Quatro is not cynical about God or Christian beliefs. The narrators (women) in the adultery string of stories grapple with lust, passion, guilt, and God. The adulterous narrator appears again in “Imperfections,” a two-page story in which the man kisses the narrator’s forehead. The kiss makes her right eye burn, “Like you put a seal on my forehead, I wrote to him later, and hot wax dripped down into my eye.” And she returns again in other short pieces, which begin to feel like the heavy, complicated breathing of two lovers held apart.
The Dish 