Nine Moons

Book excerpt: From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with human reproduction. Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss. Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru’s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak. With a scientist’s curiosity and a libertine’s unbridled imagination, Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don’t prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision. While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness, Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species. Praise for Sexographies “No other writer in the Spanish-speaking world is as fiercely independent and thoroughly irreverent as Gabriela Wiener. Constantly testing the limits of genre and gender, Wiener´s work as a cronista (which roughly translates, but is by no means a direct synonym, of nonfiction writer) has bravely unveiled truths some may prefer remain concealed about a range of topics, from the daily life of polymorphous desire to the tiring labor of maternity.” —Cristina Rivera Garza, author of The Iliac Crest “This collection of essays [opens] on the outskirts of Lima, jumps to a swinger’s party in Barcelona, and next a squirt expert’s apartment. This book can feel psychologically hazardous to read; it pushes you to answer the questions Wiener asks herself: Would I? Could I? Will I?” —Angela Ledgerwood, Esquire Best Books of 2018 “These are essays of unabashed honesty and uncommon freedom of mind, bravely reported and beautifully composed. I hadn’t known how hungry I’d been for this book, how I’d needed it and wanted other books to be it. Sexographies is an antidote and a revelation, and Gabriela Wiener is a brilliant documenter of sex and life as they really are.” —Kristin Dombek, author of The Selfishness of Others “In her native Peru, Gabriela Wiener has a reputation as a gonzo journalist who takes an active role in whatever subject she investigates, which as often as not involves sex, and not the vanilla variety. In this collection, her first translated into English, we meet a notorious polygamous pornographer; go to 6&9, a Barcelona sex club; interview the cruel Lady Monique de Nemours, a world-class dominatrix; visit Vanessa, a member of the European community of Latin American trans sex workers; get a first-hand look at the perils of threesomes; and explore other topics a tad too risqué to even name in a family newspaper. Suffice to say, Wiener’s free-wheeling style is hugely entertaining.” —Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star "Reading Gabriela Wiener is a joy. Over the years, her work has made me cry, laugh, hurt, and most importantly, dream. Her essays are daring, intimate, and honest, containing the self-awareness of a poet and the sharp focus of a marksman. I'd follow her anywhere." —Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles “One of the most interesting writers of this generation is Gabriela Wiener, a Peruvian journalist best known for her high-spirited explorations of female sexuality.... Wiener is witty and fast-paced; many of her experiences, sexual and otherwise, are hard-won, territories explored and sometimes conquered, despite her neurotic misgivings, with courage and aplomb. Part of her appeal lies in the fact that she sometimes writes about sexual topics that have not been well explored, especially by women, and a sense of incredulity is part of the pleasure of reading her work. ‘Is she really going to do that?’ the reader wonders. ‘Is she really going to write (and so openly) about doing that?’ And then she does, and there’s a slight but perceptible shift in the world because she did.” —Lisa Fetchko, Los Angeles Review of Books “With sizzling prose and journalistic attentiveness, Wiener honors the no-clothes rule. She exposes her readers to not only her body, but also to the neuroses, fears, and fantasies that come with it. True to the first-person style of gonzo journalism, each of Wiener’s fifteen transgressive crónicas pull readers into penetrative commentaries on infidelity, abortion, and threesomes, not to mention the ever-elusory ‘Ninja Squirt.’... Sexographies strikes the delicate balance between carnal and curious…. It [expands] the meaning of what pleasure in life can be, sexual or otherwise.” —Madeline Day, The Paris Review “What Peruvian essayist and “gonzo” journalist, Wiener, does in this collection is endlessly fascinating. Whether experiencing sexual subcultures or an ayahuasca trip, she uses herself as the point of departure to delve into the infinite manifestations of being human.” — Keaton, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX), Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 “Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian sex writer, and Sexografias is a book of her collected essays. However, she doesn’t just stay on the carnal, and uses her explorations of egg donation, swingers parties, cruising, and squirting as channels into meditations on motherhood, death, and immigration, all while staying sharp and funny and wild.” — Alejandra Oliva, Remezcla