Jessamyn Violet: On the Future of Sex, Genre Mashups, Los Angeles as Inspiration, and Her Novel ‘Venice Peach’
I read Jessamyn Violet’s forthcoming novel Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025) in late January, following the second Trump inauguration and after three weeks of watching my old neighborhood in Los Angeles burn. At a time when my social media feed was filled with images of evacuation updates, volunteer opportunities, and burned-down lots where my friends’ homes used to stand, one Instagram post stood out. A kinky diva had donated bondage gear to a clothing drive. The photo provided much-needed comic relief but raised a serious question. How does sex fit into dystopia?
In Venice Peach, a mash-up of satire and eroticism with elements of sci-fi and horror, a cast of eccentric Angelenos search for meaningful connection and sexual fulfillment in a post-Trump, near-future Venice Beach populated by robot cops, horny podcasters, and aggressive seagulls. I’d become a fan of Violet’s work after reading Secret Rules to Being a Rockstar (Three Rooms Press, 2023), her debut YA novel that captured the ache and anxiety of queer longing in the 1990s Los Angeles music scene. When I learned that her second novel explored sexual liberation from a speculative angle for a literary adult audience, I eagerly requested an ARC. Since Violet’s first novel was so attentive to how a teen awakens to desire and self-acceptance, I was curious to see how she depicted adults exploring futuristic forms of sexual and romantic expression.
Within minutes of reading Venice Peach, I responded to it the same way I reacted to the Instagram post with the bondage gear. I didn’t realize how much I needed to laugh until I met characters like Stevia, a theremin-playing witch, and Dr. Phil, an emotionally constipated therapist who relaxes by going on martini-fueled bicycle rides. Beneath the vivid setting details and loving satire of Venice Beach—succulents tumbling from beach house gardens, a smoothie shop that serves as a front for an underground freak circus, the crashing Pacific, the toxic stew of the Venice canals—was a moving and realistic depiction of how hard it is date, have sex, and fall in love when economic times are hard and sexual and gender expression are under political threat. I can’t think of many other novels that are this fun to read but also serve as an important reminder that it’s not only worth devoting time and care to our friendships, artistic communities, and love lives, but also urgent.
I spoke with Violet over Zoom to discuss writing great sex scenes, how Venice Beach informed the structure of her novel, and finding a home in indie publishing. You can catch her reading and performing with a psychedelic circus and her band Movie Club on her West Coast book tour from June 10 - 18.
Danielle Altman: You started writing this book in 2016 after Trump was elected, and it’s coming out early in his second presidency. I got chills reading it because it predicts the dystopia that we’re starting to live in. But the book explores how to carry on with life in a near-future recovery period from our current political state. What was your mindset when you started writing and how do you feel about it landing now?
Jessamyn Violet: It’s always risky when you write for the future. I felt so strongly about what was happening and I foresaw that we were going the wrong way. I wanted to go in my imagination to a place that was past the terrible times, to a place of rebuilding and rejuvenating. It was my way of playing around with my emotions and regarding the poor leadership and my sense of impending doom.
A part of me is very optimistic. Let there be hope. Let this book be playful. There’s a lot of books that focus on the doom and gloom. I wanted it to be about everything that I found funny about the path that we were on in American society. I had it lined up for publication with a small press and they ghosted me. I worried it might never come out because it wouldn’t be relevant ever again. But my friends were jazzed about it, so I didn’t want to discount it. Then there was the craziness of being in the same political situation again while signing the book deal and knowing we were going the wrong way with the election, even though I fought as hard as I could in the other direction. It is incredibly timely, which is crazy because I wrote it eight years ago.
DA: I found it comforting and hopeful. While big social and political problems infuse the novel, in terrifying and hilarious ways, the book is focused on the love lives and artistic and career ambitions of seven interconnected characters. It’s a personal and private exploration of how major political shifts affect dating and relationships. Did you know that was going to be your angle when you started writing?
JV: I did not. I felt like we were descending upon some highly unsexy times. I tried to put all the sexiness into the book that might come back into life after we find a better political path. It was super fun. I don’t want people to forget to be sex positive during these times. A lot of creativity can be found in the sexual realm. I also wanted to force myself out of my comfort zone. To try to write something that competed on the sex level of an HBO show, for example. Part of the reason I think books have lost some of their audience is that TV shows are so saucy and exciting. I had to tell myself not to worry about the fact that people I know could read it and think, wow, she, she imagined that. Which will happen. But every writer knows you have to write like everyone you know is dead to get anything good on the page.
DA: When you say comfort level, do you mean comfort level writing about sex or artistically depicting sex the way a movie or TV show does? Or both?
JV: My comfort level writing explicitly about sex. Growing up reading books, I always was bummed out when the books moved on when it got to the good part. I didn’t want to be that writer. I wanted to get into the good part. I wasn’t worried about censorship. Everyone says, write uninhibitedly and then if someone tells you to cut something out, you decide if you are going to cut it out. Lucky for me, I’ve had a pair of very punk rock publishers who have not asked me to cut anything out in that regard.
My first book was YA, and it was probably better off under new adult or adult with the level of explicit content in it. I submitted it to get reviewed for intellectual property rights for film and television and they said that in the wake of Euphoria they couldn’t accept material that dark and racy for teens. Secret Rules to Being a Rockstar was nothing like Euphoria. I don’t know why the book world has to be so reserved in that department. In video games, you go around shooting people. Why is a book under different rules where it has to be safer? It doesn’t. You should be able to access all sorts of things as a reader. Most importantly, a book should be exciting to read.
DA: One thing I loved about the sex scenes is that they’re layered with the surrealism of the genre mashup, but they are also realistic and honest. The sex is funny, surprising, disappointing, and hot. You pay attention to what goes on in the characters’ minds when they're hooking up. You capture the mechanics of sex, but more deeply, desire itself. How playful and mercurial it is, how it can change from person to person or moment to moment. Was the nature of desire top of mind when you were working on the sex scenes?
JV: I’m a hugely character-driven writer. The ways in which characters have sex and what they’re thinking when they have sex is a huge part of who they are. Anyone can watch porn or read erotica but what is more interesting to me is what motivates the character to have intimacy, or violent non-intimacy, with another creature or person. One of the characters is a virgin and she loses her virginity in a surprising way. But the way that she loses it makes sense to the character because it’s with people that she loves and trusts.
Something that shocks me is how little people are having sex. People remain virgins through their twenties, you know? I’m not making a stand whether that’s bad or good, it’s just interesting. That people may be less comfortable getting into sexual situations with other people. I think that’s partly a product of technology. It’s interesting to explore why people are not having sex, if that’s a bad or good thing, and what’s causing that.
DA: The book is such an astute, speculative imagining of the future of dating apps and how social media affects gender relations. What are your thoughts on how technology supports and hinders people’s sexual and romantic lives?
JV: The biggest sadness for me about dating apps is that they may prevent people from finding activities to go out and do, where they could meet people who they would naturally be attracted to. I had bad boundaries for a long time due to craziness as a kid and teenager, but I never used apps because it was scary territory. You’re essentially going on blind dates, but not even through a reference. You’re meeting someone somewhere and anything can happen. There’s a level of safety that isn’t there. I’m an eighties baby and the way I went about dating was to go out to places I liked, see shows, and do activities that I liked.
Sexuality is a rocky road no matter what time period you’re born in. I wonder what percentage of people don’t have a rocky road, who have nice experiences and meet their partner and head off into the sunset. Dating apps in the book provide a lot of humor, but I don’t go too hard in the direction of criticizing them. You gotta do what you gotta do. It’s not a judgment thing. I do despair as someone who works in the live event industry as a musician and as a writer. We need more people going out and it seems like app dating has somewhat curbed that need to go and find your community.
DA: Your first novel is YA, with one point of view in first person, in the realist mode. Venice Peach has seven POVs, each in first person. Elements of horror, sci-fi, satire, eroticism, and realism are woven throughout. When I was reading, I marveled at this fun, surreal world you built with characters facing relatable problems. What brought you to those genres, and how did you master them? From a craft perspective, how did you combine those genres and so successfully pull it off?
JV: Part of it is my love of so many different genres and not wanting to belong in only one. I admire and am somewhat jealous of writers who can crush it in one genre. That’s marketability. It’s well-advised. Also, this book is centered around Venice Beach, and Venice Beach is a natural mashup of genres. The book couldn’t exist any other way. Venice Beach is a place where you see drugs, street art, skating, rich people, tech, crime, lust, witches, clowns, and a freak circus. I had a drug dealer way back before weed was legal and he said he did community service on Venice Beach. He found sacrificial chickens and a raccoon with something weird done to it. There are horror and ghosts there. There’s a cursed seagull in my book which encapsulates the animals that are in Venice, like the possums that stare you down on the sidewalk. Those possums are not afraid. They will follow you home if you stick out a piece of food. It’s hilarious.
The sense of setting is what drove me to mashup all the genres because I couldn’t imagine a book that couldn’t move between all those things. There had to be a theremin-playing witch who wants to get famous. There had to be the stiff psychiatrist who is one of those guys cycling on the bike path that makes you think, why is that guy so angry? Why is he on the bike path if he’s trying to go sixty miles an hour?
Venice Beach is full of people who are stoned and falling all over each other. It’s not the place to be a Speedo biker. Take Auggie, the party bus driver character who is a war veteran, who’s into conspiracy theories. I don’t know anyone like that, but I do know party buses are hilarious. There are some interesting buses and vans in Venice. I wanted to deep dive into the psyche of someone who drove one of those vans and to explore what would make that an appealing job in future. In Los Angeles people are out and about at all times of the day. Don’t these people have jobs? My character Cassandra inherited her house on the Venice canal, and she makes money by collecting rent, teaching yoga, and being in a band. I didn’t even bother attaching any form of income to the character Odessa, who is a drummer. She’s a free spirit. Those people exist in Venice, though you wouldn’t know how they make ends meet. Odessa is probably many, many months behind on her rent. Local tenancy laws protect people like Odessa from getting kicked out.
DA: Structurally, the book is a set of interconnected stories, similar to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. We loop back and forth between seven characters’ perspectives as their lives intersect. How did that structure emerge?
JV: I wish I had a craft point on that, but that wrote itself. I had a list of characters I wanted to create in Venice, conglomerations of people who I had seen, and I wanted to imagine their backstory. For instance, the podcaster character Matt Bogart suffers from a ‘son of a famous person’ complex. I had a list of attributes and types of people that fascinated me. It wove together in a way that required me getting out of the way.
Never in my life did I think I was going to write a book that had that many main characters. I thought they were going to be short stories in the beginning, but I ended up with each character’s POV cycling through four times. That seemed like the perfect cycle.
DA: I’d love to hear you talk about satire. From the jump, we meet a character lamenting a tarot reading and another named Stevia. It’s so punchy that I had the sense the author was winking at me. By creating an absurdist near-future world, you were able to poke fun at the cynical, performative time we live in now, with a celebrity president who denies facts and a social media universe that lets us lead multiple lives, where we’re all the Wizard of Oz winking from behind our own curtains. I loved that and I wondered, why am I not reading more books where the author is winking at me? Was that intentional?
JV: I am winking at the reader the whole time! I’m doing that with a strong sense of Tom Robbins in my heart and Kurt Vonnegut, two of my all-time favorites. There’s also a kids’ book series called Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar. It’s a huge reference for Venice Peach’s tone. It’s an absurdist series about a class that goes to school on the thirtieth floor of a building because they built it the wrong way. In the first chapter, the teacher wiggles her ears, sticks out her tongue, and turns all her students into apples. Sachar’s tone and voice are great. It’s pure satire. There’s a chapter where these robbers come to the classroom to try to get money. A kid holds up a workbook that says, “Knowledge is more valuable than money.” A robber picks up the workbook and says, “Maybe I will become a scientist instead of a robber.” It’s super goofy, hilarious stuff.
Those voices left an impact on me, where the author’s clearly having fun with their job. There’s so much serious literature out there. I always wanted to be someone people enjoyed reading. I want reading my work to be a fun experience overall. Of course, you want there to be a spectrum of emotions, not just wink, wink the whole time. But Venice Peach was my life raft in a very otherwise distressing time, the first of the bad elections from hell.
DA: I can’t let you go without asking about the cover. It’s so cute and funny, the perfect homage to Venice Beach, and it reflects your voice and the novel so well. How did that cover come about?
JV: I’m a huge fan of murals and graffiti. There’s a street artist in Venice, Jules Muck, known as MuckRock. I asked her if she could make a peach that’s a Venice peach. We didn’t have a big budget, but she said “find a wall and I’ll do it.” I didn’t give her any notes. She took her spray paints in the alley, we didn’t get permission, and we did it in less than twenty minutes. Supporting your community of artists and the people in your community is everything. If you feel like you’re above it, then you’re being too precious. The art world is hurting right now, very badly. People like MuckRock get it. When a hero shows up for you like that, you never forget it.
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Jessamyn Violet is a writer and musician out of Venice Beach, CA. Originally from Massachusetts, she graduated with a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. She went on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. She’s placed short fiction in Ploughshares, Lit Angels, 805 Art + Lit, Adelaide, and more. Her debut queer novel Secret Rules to Being a Rockstar was published by Three Rooms Press in April 2023. Her sophomore adult novel Venice Peach is coming June 10th, 2025 from Maudlin House. Jessamyn's also the drummer for psych rock band Movie Club. More info can be found at www.jessamynviolet.com.
