As bad sex goes, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a scene more virtuosically dire than the six-page encounter that materialises partway through Weirdo, comedian Sara Pascoe’s characterful debut novel. It takes place on a futon, beneath a sheet so crumb-covered it’s exfoliating. While wishing she knew “how to stop sex without it being embarrassing”, first-person narrator Sophie splices clinical detail with surreal flights of associative fancy that have her picturing, say, a tube train full of tongues wearing ties.
Much about the book’s tone and content will be familiar to Pascoe’s fans. Like the sitcom Out of Her Mind, which she wrote and starred in, it depicts a woman struggling to conform to the kinds of relationships and responsibilities that others make look so easy. It also shares the preoccupations of Pascoe’s nonfiction titles, Animal and Sex Power Money – buzzy disquisitions on dating and mating that blitzed memoir with evolutionary biology and feminism to entertaining, sometimes enlightening effect.
