A Collaboration Between
Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal

In their own words…

Renate Stendhal:

“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 heterosexual journey, and Alma, cool blonde lesbian from the German north.

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

Kim being my opponent, accomplice, and my inspiration for Claire, this fantasy could not work. Claire and Alma’s story would be a provocation of the theme. These two—Venus and the Amazon—would be worthy opponents. They would equally provoke each other—as Kim and I consistently do—unmasking the weakness in each other’s costume, stance, or argument. At the same time, each would grow aware of the erituc 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 by the other. And each might try her best to escape the challenge, avoid precisely what was so desirable in this passion sprung from 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.

Nevertheless, this was fiction and I had to invent. Alma and Claire are fictitious (Kim thinks there is nothing fictitious about them) as is everything else in the book. Yet Alma is inspired by who I was in the past, in my years as an active feminist in Paris, and who I might have been had I met this woman called Claire.

We wrote our book in alternating sections, not giving each other more than minimal clues. We waited till the end to see how the story and the discourse fit together. Claire sent letters to Alma, I read these letters Kim had written. I had Alma mull over Claire’s brash stories of her uninhibited sexual coming of age, just as I myself was mulling over them, fascinated and enraged at the same time, doubting that any of it was true. My reaction, however, was Alma’s reaction, and the story of their relationship evolved…

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 in Herbst Hall, a Berkeley concert stage, in 1991, Kim predicted that she would be recognized as the great voice of our time. Kim immediately wanted to write about Cecilia’s emotional impact on an audience. 

My enthusiasm for Cecilia took off after seeing her for the first time in an operatic role, a few years later. When I saw her acting, running, dancing, clowning across the stage and still showering her audience with the beauty and perfection 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 write about Cecilia Bartoli 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 traces of each new opera she had taken on, and analyze her artistic development. This role by role documentation is my part of the collaboration on what we have come to call our ‘portrait of the artist as a young woman.’”

Kim Chernin:

“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 cafe. 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 . . .”