Beyond You & Me
by Deborah Woehr
Beyond You & Me is the story of Cassie DiMarco, a 24 year-old secretary at Yale University during the Sexual Revolution, who suffers a traumatic love affair with a foreign student before losing him and her husband.
I normally don’t read erotica, although after reading W.S. Cross’s story, I may start. This blog transported me back to a time I barely remember (I was a kid, then.), except for the euphoric idealism I saw in people during that era.
What really struck a chord in me was the difficulty this author is having in securing an agent, despite the fact that there is a clear market for this book. Cross did what many authors are doing, migrating to the Internet to carve out a name for themselves. In a few short months, this author has built a readership of over 15,000.
Interview Excerpt
What compelled you to write this story?
A friend loaned me a journal she’d kept 30 years ago while a grad student’s wife at Yale on the condition that I not reveal her real identity. The story grabbed me right away.
She was twenty-four at the time, bright, but without a college degree. So Yale wouldn’t let her be more than a secretary. They treated their clerical staff back then no better than their custodial staff. As a matter of history, Yale has had among the worst labor relations in all the college world. They are notorious.
So as the old proverb goes, “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” Along the way, she falls in love with an undergrad, experiences a series of erotic encounters with both him and other women, and loses both her lover and her husband before coming out whole on the other side of it all.
The story seemed both timeless (temptation, flirtation, adultery, conflict) and timely (today she’d probably have her own blog), since it takes place at the dawn of the Women’s Movement and the height of the Sexual Revolution in 1975. Her experiences spoke to me because we’re still struggling with many of the same questions, such as sexual fidelity vs. sexual freedom. Is it possible to be in love with more than one person at the same time?
Read the full interview here.
