Hooray, my memoir The Chilli Pepper Club is now available to purchase. It’s been a long road to publication, and what began as The Chilli Pepper Sex Club is now The Chilli Pepper Club, so I thought I’d explain why I reluctantly chose to take ‘Sex’ off the cover.
Twenty years ago, I decided I wanted to write a book about vulvodynia – a devastating gynaecological condition that affects millions of women worldwide, yet is often misdiagnosed and underreported. I have lived with vulvodynia since my early teens and it has had a huge impact on every facet of my life. Penetrative vaginal sex was intensely painful until the age of 36, when, at last, I received successful treatment.
After numerous knockbacks, I managed to get a literary agent to represent me, but publishers were reticent. I wasn’t a high-profile personality, they said. I didn’t have a big enough social media following, it was a ‘niche’ health issue, and at the time the market was all about sexual fun not sexual pain – although the Fifty Shades take on sexual pain as pleasure was going down a treat.
Years later, I was offered a deal with a small independent publisher if I was willing to co-write a book with a doctor about painful sex. But it would be led by the doctor (someone they had in mind who wasn’t a specialist in vulval pain) and brief personal anecdotes from me would cover the patient experience. I turned it down. I realised I wanted to write my story my way. There are some great books available now about vulvodynia and sexual health from a medical perspective, but I wanted to explain how it feels, and to track the experience over decades with a cultural backdrop: in a world where mind-blowing sex has become an almost mandatory aspiration, how does it feel to b sexually compromised? I wanted to explore questions about the nature of intimacy, how we define ‘real’ sex and what it means to be a ‘real’ woman. And in telling my story, I also wanted to discuss issues that are high on the cultural agenda including feminism, porn and erotica, culture and language, medical gaslighting, and body image. Whilst women’s experiences of vulval pain and sexual health issues may differ, my aim was to find some common threads that would resonate, and to offer hope and support. I also hoped that by sharing my experiences and thoughts in the sexual health space I might kickstart a dialogue and encourage innovation and change in the sector.
After many more years of rejections from publishers, I thought fuck it, I’ll do it myself. I’ll do it creatively, professionally, valiantly on my own terms. I looked into my options and decided to go with Kindle Direct Publishing and sell the book on Amazon. Self-publishing has been a steep learning curve and had I known how costly it would be in terms of time, energy and cash I might not have persevered, but here I am with the book in my hand.
As you’ll see from the blog images, my initial title was The Chill Pepper Sex Club with a vulva-esque chilli adorning the cover. This was the moniker a former partner of mine gave to the London Vulval Pain Support Group which I used to host – a wry nod to the burning pain of vulvodynia. However, I was advised that self-publishing companies have more stringent criteria than the bigger publishing houses when it comes to what they deem sexually explicit, particularly on a book’s cover. To avoid being dumped in online retail’s ‘sin bin’ with assorted porn and erotica titles I would have to change my language and imagery. Emblazoning ‘Sex Club’ across the front cover was a no-go. I would need to pitch the book very clearly as a health-focused story rather than a sexual memoir if I wanted it to be visible and searchable in general categories on Amazon – otherwise it would have limited reach. So, ‘Sex’ got removed from the foreground, but despite this lack of foreplay it’s still on a roll between the covers.
To publish this book to a high standard, I worked with a team of professionals – an editor, a proofreader and a graphic designer. It’s cost me more than £2,000, but I like to think it was worth the frustration and outlay. Perhaps I could’ve done it on the cheap, but I’ve been in an intimate relationship with this project for decades and I’m a perfectionist with a recent ADHD diagnosis, so it was ride or die. I’ll need to sell a truck load of books to break even, but at last it’s out of my head and in print, and will soon be available as an audio book too. A huge thank you to everyone who has supported me along the way – full acknowledgements are included towards the end of the book.
If you’ve been kind enough to purchase The Chilli Pepper Club, there are a few simple ways you can support me and help raise awareness of vulval pain and other sexual health issues:
Post a positive review of the book on Amazon.
Shout it out on your social media and tag and follow my channels (X, Instagram, Blue Sky).
Listen to my podcast Women4Real: Getting real about women’s sexual health. Available on all major podcast platforms. A ‘follow’ and a positive review would be fantastic.
Thank you for your support.