A Collaboration Between
Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal

In their own words…

First collaboration

Renate:

“Our collaboration on Sex and Other Sacred Games began with the one thing that was clear: we didn’t agree. Our experiences, with men and women, were as different as our theories. I claimed women participated in men’s sexuality and had no sexuality of their own. Kim maintained that male sexuality had nothing to do with sex, because it had so little to do with sensuality. The most powerful thing walking the earth, she claimed, was a sexual woman.

When I started writing I envisioned two women in an archetypal opposition, a radical feminist and a “femme fatale.” Our different life experiences and the theories they gave rise to would become transposed, abstracted, and reembodied. Claire, footloose American on a hot heterosexual journey, and Alma, lesbian from the cool German north.

I knew, of course, that this constellation in itself could sound like a feminist cliché: Dyke courts Hetera and wins her over. Forever.

Kim being my opponent, accomplice, and my inspiration for Claire, this easy theme could not work. Claire and Alma’s story would be a provocation. These two—Venus and the Amazon—would be worthy opponents. They would equally provoke each other—as Kim and I like to do—unmasking the weakness in each other’s costume, stance, or argument. At the same time, each would grow aware of the erotic power of the other. When I started, I was not sure how the story of Alma and Claire would end. Each of them might seduce and conquer or be seduced and conquered. And each might try her best to escape the challenge, avoid precisely what was so desirable in this difference, fascination, and intrigue.

After all, the outcome did not depend on me, but on our “collaboration.” I simply set the stage. How would these two unlikely women meet? How would they take the bait of mutual interest? It had to happen at a café, over cups of café au lait. A particular Paris café where for years, I had been writing, translating, watching, dreaming. “My” café (Le Rostand, Rue Medicis) was the place where one day, out of the blue, I had met Kim and learned that she had chosen the same cafe for writing on her trips to Paris.

Alma and Claire are fictitious (Kim thinks there is nothing fictitious about them) as is everything else in the book. We wrote in alternating sections, not giving each other more than minimal clues. We exchanged our characters’ letters and stories as if receiving them in the mail, waiting till the end to see how it all fit together and how it would end.”

Kim:

“Perhaps no one thought up the idea of our collaboration, perhaps no one made a decision to write Sex and Other Sacred Games together. Maybe the idea of collaboration was always there and one day simply became self-evident, perhaps by a wish to reconcile ourselves to being different.

We got an advance for our project and then I dropped out. The fact was, collaboration unnerved me. For me writing had been an inviolable cave in which to shut myself away from the world, all relationships, for as long as possible. How could I let someone else enter that space, turn on the lights when I wanted things kept dark, move around in the confined space I kept to myself to have a self in?

Renate began writing. I cheered her from the wings, stubborn as always, my mind made up.

I remember the exact moment I returned to the collaboration. Renate had been writing a dialogue between two women meeting for the first time in a Paris café. When I was still part of the project we had decided we wouldn’t show one another our work in progress. We would each go our own way, see how it all fit together later. For some reason (hmm!) Renate had left her dialogue face up on the kitchen table. I moved her pages to one side, true to the spirit of the original agreement. (Somehow), a single paragraph caught my eye. It was a description of Claire, the character Renate had invented to represent me. I immediately noticed that Claire was more beautiful, better dressed, more self-consciously self-ironic. Nevertheless, Renate had caught me as I had been, in younger days, only with men.

I was back in the project on the spot! I didn’t read another paragraph, not even one more line. Renate had invented a character through whom I could tell the truth about myself, as I had not been able to tell it before. She had given me just enough of a disguise (bright red lipstick, matching nails) to let me present the forbidden self who had shown up in years of psychoanalytic conversation, but had never been introduced even to my most intimate friends. Renate, my collaborator, had invented me . . .”    

Second Collaboration

Renate:

“Our second collaboration, Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song, was again based on an intensely shared interest and a different view point. Kim’s fascination with Cecilia Bartoli as a concert performer was immediate. The minute the very young and still totally unknown singer appeared at Hearst Hall, a Berkeley concert stage, in 1991, Kim predicted that she would be recognized as the great voice of our time. Kim wanted to write about this voice and its emotional impact on an audience.  She wanted to know what exactly the conductors, opera directors and managers who first discovered Cecilia, had heard and experienced in the presence of this unique talent.

My enthusiasm for Cecilia took off after seeing her for the first time in an operatic role, a few years later. Watching her acting, running, dancing, clowning across the stage and still showering us with the perfection of her coloratura and the beauty of her voice, I was in awe. We met Cecilia, interviewed her, and got invited to the first master class she gave together with her mother, who had been her only teacher. 

I had written about stage performances for many years as a cultural correspondent in Paris. Now I wanted to focus on Cecilia as a stage performer. I would investigate every role she had sung from the beginning of her career. Kim and I traveled across Europe to find the archival audio-visual records of each new opera she had taken on, and analyze her artistic development. We have come to think of our studies and interviews as our ‘portrait of the artist as a young woman.’”

Third and fourth (final) collaboration.

Renate: 

“I am writing this in 2022, a good year after Kim left this planet, to complete what we already wrote about in our collaboration.

Until the mid-nineties, Kim and I were “old-world” published authors, enjoying the privileges of publishing our books with what is now called “the big five” – the major traditional publishing houses. We watched with dismay how this old world crumbled under an increasingly driven bestseller hunt and the rapidly growing market of e-books and DIY publishing. Kim had been a bestselling author with four of her early books. Now we were mid-list authors, an “endangered species.”

Kim was convinced that the only answer to this drastic shift would be the rise of small presses and the best defense would be creating our own small women’s press. We gathered our writer friends under one roof in Berkeley and in 2000,  launched EdgeWork Books as a collective of twelve women writers. With funding from feminist patrons, we managed to publish a dozen luxurious hardcover novels, poetry, and nonfiction. Our adventure seemed promising: we hosted a series of EdgeWork Salons at the beautiful Montclair Women’s Cultural Arts Club in Oakland to promote our books. (See a video of our launch salon on the video page.) But our efforts collapsed with the catastrophe of 9/11: our funding ran out overnight and we did not have the means to fight against the ensuing general slump in the book market.

A good decade later, Kim and I got curious about online publishing, the freedom, and speed of this new DIY publishing world. The atmosphere had been heating up with gay marriage debates, with San Francisco pioneering the legal battle. By the time the battle was finally won nationwide, in 2014, some of our friends had gotten married three times! As feminist outliers, Kim and I never wanted to get married. We had lived together for almost three decades and didn’t feel the need for a blessing from the state. But the historical significance of this victory, the joy, and celebration across the nation became irresistible. We felt we had something to contribute. We knew a few things about long-term lesbian relationships, the ups and downs, ecstasies and despairs, the teamwork, the essential negotiations of monogamy. 

Quite spontaneously, we launched into another writing project together. We wanted to set down the rules of engagement for all the newlyweds. A toolkit, we thought. A simple Dos and Don´ts of successful survival as a couple. We felt like crones, sharing advice and caveats with a smile.