Michelle Kicherer: On Professional Sexting, Starting A New Press, Her Motto of Doing Whatever You Want, and Her Debut Novella ‘Sexy Life, Hello’

What can I tell you about Sexy Life, Hello that won’t spoil you from the cool yet tension-filled pleasure of discovering its hundred-something pages yourself? 

In Michelle Kicherer’s exciting debut novella, Jane loses her job as an fourth-grade teacher in a messy opening moment that walks the line between passion and awkwardness. So real that I could not look away. Saddled with limited choices, Jane becomes a nanny for twins to a literary super couple; the babies’ names, Franny and Zooey, are a perfect touch. Then, she takes on a second gig as a porn star’s professional sexter. Throughout the book, Jane dives into a world of unexpected dualities and intrusions, and Kicherer constructs a quick-paced narrative that challenges our understanding of sexuality, maternity, and their myriad of implications on women’s bodies and emotions. 

Though Jane’s second job is by nature graphic—the fantasies of “mystical bestiality” come up more than once—Kicherer infuses meaning into the most ridiculous of imageries, largely because Jane approaches them with the at once removed and overwhelmed perspective of an outsider. And as Jane moves through a journey that oscillates between recoil and exploration, on her terms and other’s, we are invited to reflect upon our lives and taboos.  

On a Thursday afternoon, with our pets in the background, I spoke to Michelle about her fascinating novella and the equally fascinating story behind its writing and release. A story that involves the founding of a new press, recording her own audiobook, and taking control. The last of which, like Jane, we might all be wrestling with.    

Jessica Bao: I thought we could start with the premise, which was one of the first things that drew me to Sexy Life, Hello: an elementary school teacher turned porn star’s sexter. How did you come up with this idea? 

Michelle Kicherer: I used to work in schools, mostly elementary, and elementary through high school at certain points. For several years while I was writing and throughout grad school, I was a nanny as well. So these are two settings that I’m very familiar with and I think have some really interesting intricacies. 

Simultaneously, I was working on a novel that has a much more difficult topic, so I kept looking at other writing gigs and stuff in between to work on when it was getting hard, and I saw an ad for a ghostwriter for a porn star. I used to do ghostwriting; I’ve ghostwritten several books and memoirs. So I saved the ad and just kept thinking about it and looking at it, and I started writing this book while I was working on another book. Then at some point, maybe a year or so later, I saw another ad for a similar job and I applied for it. That porn star, her niche is mystical bestiality and kooky animal stuff. I thought that was very interesting. So I ended up applying. I got to the very last stage of the interview, but I was writing all of these crazy answers, or what I thought was crazy, and they were like, This is perfect.  

A lot of times I will take something that’s based on real life a little bit—like I’m familiar with the setting in some capacity—and then just shift it and keep shifting it until it becomes almost unrecognizable as my own. It’s not my own story, but it started off as me in some way. Then it just keeps changing until it becomes this totally different character, this different world. But yeah, I usually start off with some idea that just is kind of weird. 

JB: That actually fits perfectly into my next question, because something that I noticed as I was reading this book—and maybe I didn't expect—was that even though Jane lands in this sexter job that’s one of those classic crazy side-gigs for writers, she “didn’t like writing, she didn’t even like reading.” Multiple characters throughout the story are super involved in the writing community, but she also comes at it from the outside. What inspired you to create a character that, though she ends up in a writing-adjacent job and community, is totally separate from it? 

MK: I wanted Jane to not really know what she wanted, and that she doesn't have this plan. She takes these two different jobs only because they won’t check a record and she can do them under the table. She’s like, This is a quick solution and quick money-making. I think she has this untapped creative potential that she didn’t realize is there. So when she ends up interacting with all of these different customers and writing these different scenarios out, she’s on the brink of multiple types of discoveries about herself. It’s almost like she doesn’t really realize how creative and/or sexy she can be. She’s just lived this vanilla life so far. So I was really interested in taking a character that was almost boring at first and then letting her discover herself. She’s not really planning on being a writer, and then there’s other characters who are really set on, I want to be a writer. I want to be something. They have this plan, and she’s plan-less. So that was exciting, to help her figure out what she should be doing with herself.

JB: Sexy Life, Hello has some pretty racy content, towards which Jane maintains almost a dry objectiveness, no matter how graphic or absurd it is. There are a lot of realistic, fascinating details there too. How did you go about researching the real life role of a porn star’s sexter, and how did you decide what to include or leave out from your research?

MK: My first research was just interviewing for the position, and I got to the final stage where I was meeting their team. They had this whole crew of people working for her. They had multiple sexters. It was this whole community that’s very lucrative, and this very protected porn star that we wouldn’t really be interacting with a whole lot. That was my first intro into it. Then I ended up talking with a couple different sex workers who do this type of work, as well as a couple of strippers. 

The thing that stood out to me most was, for one thing, a lot of them were queer and very not interested in their male clientele, or just not into men, I should say. It’s also just such a job, and the client on the other side is falling for them and living this fantasy. Yeah, they know it’s fake, but it can get so personal in some ways. The person writing the stuff or performing is so disconnected a lot of the time. And if anything, with me and my sexter friends, we're laughing at some of the stuff that their customers are saying or we’re doing something else while sexting. That was where the nannying and sexting thing came in, that Jane’s totally doing something else and they think that she’s really involved in the conversation. It’s almost like she is good at it because she can just quickly fire off some messages that are really turning people on, and she just doesn’t give a shit. There’s female clients as well, but especially when she’s catering to men, she’s really not actually emotionally involved. There’s really very little in it for her at first, but it does untap something in her, that she’s on the cusp of having more of a sexual awakening and power. She’s starting to figure out who she is and that she can be sexier and kinkier than she realized. 

JB: As I was reading the book, I was kind of punched in the face by this duality that you found between Jane’s two professions. There are all these parallels: strap-ons and strapping the babies into their strollers; “into the mouth,” a phrase that both mothers and clients use. I thought that was really good. Lola, the porn star, is described as “somehow both sexual and motherly, overpowering yet friendly. Welcoming, warm, wanting.” How did you approach such a sensitive duality, straddling the line of this maybe controversial subject? Did you find it controversial?

MK: Yeah, I think it is definitely controversial. I was interested in looking at women’s bodies for what they’re “made for,” like producing children, breastfeeding; this nurturing entity. We look at mothers in this really particular way, but then women of all ages and identities—mother or not mother—are also sexual beings. It’s thinking of how the same woman who’s breastfeeding, her tits are also objectified. I think especially as women are aging, whether or not they’re becoming a mother, our bodies are changing in certain ways so that we’re less “sexy,” and men are more and more attracted to, generally, young firm bodies of a certain type. Honestly, I think about that a lot. It’s infuriating to me, the cliché of the man in midlife getting with a younger woman, or how the body that we’re constantly immortalizing is this young fit thing. I just wanted to look at that and explore it a little bit and show this really sexual side. Because Jane does not have this “great body,” and in fact is paranoid about it and doesn’t feel sexy. That made me feel bad for her. I feel bad for her that she doesn’t feel sexy and desirable herself, and that she uses this avatar of Lola who has this “perfect body” as a vessel to feel sexy. She almost embodies Lola in order to feel desirable. So part of my goal is looking at this idolizing of the female body and helping this character unlock her own sexiness.

JB: This is a chicken-or-the-egg question that I’m always really interested in. When you started out writing this book, did you know that this was something you wanted to explore, or was this something that you found as you went along? Did you make Jane a nanny to explore that, or did that come after?

MK: Ooh, that’s a cool question. Yeah, I definitely did not know what I wanted to explore at first. All I knew was that something about ghostwriting for a porn star was really interesting to me. And then it’s like the more I was writing, the more I was like, Why is she doing this job? I wanted her to be at the start of it and figuring it out, being new to it and stumbling through it. It was less interesting if she was just really good at it naturally, and she has already been doing it for a while. So I liked that she was forced into it in some way. Then I thought of the school setting because I’d been working on a character in a different book project that was a fourth-grade teacher, and I ended up actually cutting that. So I just kept thinking about this fourth-grade teacher and I was like, I need her somewhere. So she kind of came into this project. 

Also I mean, teachers love to party. Teachers are sexy behind the scenes. We’re talking about drinking and fucking. In the classroom, especially when you’re working with kids, you try to be as not sexualized as possible. Sometimes there’s this like pent-upness because you have to be a certain way. So it’s almost like Teachers Gone Wild a little bit. 

JB: It’s like that joke about seeing your teachers at the grocery store, but the extreme version. 

MK: Yeah. I guess to answer the second part, I always call it in classes the “aboutness” of a story. Like there’s the plot line of what’s happening, and then there’s also the emotional arc that a lot of times, for me at least, comes later. As I’m fleshing out the plot, I start realizing, Okay, what could this be saying, without it being too direct? I’m not trying to write an essay or a paper. I am trying to entertain and create a world and it’s fiction, but I like putting in these other things. I started weaving them in and thinking, Who is this lady? What is her goal by the end of the book? And once I realized her emotional journey, I started weaving that to the beginning a little bit more. 

JB: That’s what I was curious about, the aboutness. Sometimes I want to write a story that talks about this social problem, but then I wonder if it’s the wrong way to go about things, because it can become too preachy. I’m always trying to find that balance.

I do want to talk about the ending, which I won’t spoil here, but I thought it was a very unexpected but also organic way for everything and everyone to come together. How did you come to that convergence, and what was your process of choosing what to explore or leave out in finding the ending for your book?

Mk: Thank you for not giving away the spoilers. I always appreciate that. For one thing I’ll say, I love an ambiguous ending, and I wanted the reader to have enough to figure out Jane’s next move. Are we meeting her at the start of this new career that she is going to live in now, or is this too much for her? Because there’s this tension that’s building throughout the book, where we start getting worried about her visibility, if she’s going to get caught. There’s multiple ways that she could get caught. I liked the nervousness and the tension around that. I liked thinking about all the different ways in which she could get caught and by which characters. I liked wondering what her reaction would be. Basically, I was trying to get her to a point where she needs to make a decision of which life path she is going on here. I can leave parts of that up to the reader, what they’re rooting for and what they hope that she’s going to do. But after I finished this now about a year and a half ago, I started working on a part two, because it felt like there was more to say about Jane’s journey. She’s just interesting to me and I’m rooting for her in her bizarre world.

JB: Can you speak more to that decision and process of doing a part two?

MK: Well, I don’t want to say too much, but I’ll say that I never intended on having a part two. The whole book started as a break in between writing this pretty heavy novel that I just finished and started pitching. It’s called You, Weirdo. I was writing Sexy Life, Hello as a one-off. It’s very different from the other things I write. So at first I was worried I am going to get pigeonholed if this is my debut book. It has the word sex in the title! I’m like, Oh my Gosh, are people going to see this and think Michelle Kicherer just writes—some review called it “tasteful smut.” 

But then it just was so enjoyable and funny. I remember that while I was writing, I kept rereading parts and literally laughing by myself. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought about Jane so much that I just started tinkering with part two, because I could already see it once we were in the final editing stages and I performed the audiobook, and I really got into character more. I started thinking about what she’s doing now. 

JB: I’m glad you mentioned the audiobook, because you actually made the decision to release Sexy Life, Hello as an audiobook before the print edition, and you performed it yourself. Can you tell us more about the decision to do that, and what it was like to record your own book?

MK: When I first was submitting the book, and it had a couple offers on it, those offers said that I wouldn’t be able to perform the audiobook myself. That’s pretty typical. Sometimes if it’s a memoir, you do your own. But a lot of times they’ll buy the subsidiary rights and sell the audiobook, and you get a cut. With these contracts, it was a flat rate of what I would get. I wouldn’t get royalties and I wouldn’t have ownership, so I wouldn’t get to choose the voice actor and I wouldn’t own it. It just sat really badly with me, because I do a lot of things creatively. I host a radio show, I host a variety show, I do a lot of production work and I work with a lot of sound engineers. I just really wanted to perform my own audiobook, I think because I’m a radio personality and show personality. So when they had said I couldn’t, after I talked to a lot of people about it—lawyers and subsidiary rights people—I finally was like, You know what? I just want to do whatever I want with this. I’m kind of punk rock about how I do writing stuff. If it doesn’t feel true to me in some way, it makes my skin crawl. It pissed me off actually. I was like, No, fuck that, I want to be involved. 

So I ended up writing a grant and I won it. The grant paid for producing the audiobook. I got to record at a studio that I love in Portland called Dead Aunt Thelma’s. We released the audiobook first, partly because we were like, Well, what if we only do an audiobook? But then the more I was performing it and practicing and getting into it, the more I realized, No, I want to go all the way. I also kept looking up in the studio in between takes and the engineers were just cracking up, and I wanted that reaction. I want people to hold this book and I want to imagine them laughing. That made me feel so happy. 

So the origin was getting told, No, you can’t do it this way. And I was like, Yes, I can. I’ll do it myself then. It was very validating to have these publishers wanting this book and I had the validation of knowing that it was a wanted thing. Maybe I needed that. But I was like, I’m going to get this out in the way that I want it to be out. Man, it was the best creative decision. 

I ended up founding my own press because of this, because I ended up talking to a lot of writers who were really unhappy with the way their publishers worked or how much they didn’t get to control things or get certain royalties. I think the publishing industry is just like the music industry. The author ends up getting the least amount of money sometimes. It’s just an upsetting thing, and I didn’t want to have a part of it in that way. 

I loved the audiobook and I loved releasing it six months before the print book came out. It’s easy to download. It’s not something we have to ship. And it creates a little buzz and lets it exist for a while, which is not normally something that presses do. If anything, the print book comes out first and then the audiobook a few weeks later. But I was like, Well, I guess I can do whatever I want, so who cares? It’s funny how anytime I’ve done something that's not industry standard, it doesn’t matter. The same with the cover design. I really wanted to design the cover and work with this illustrator that I really love named Ryan Johnson. And they wouldn’t let me do the cover art. That’s a typical thing with a lot of publishers: either you don’t get to choose your cover or you have to fight for the one you want. But I was like, What? This is my book. I had such a vision for it, and Ryan just did such an incredible job. I had given him such bizarre ideas and he just made this thing that was perfect. So I love it. So yeah, you can do whatever you want, people. That’s one of the mottos of Banana Pitch Press. You can do whatever you want. 

JB: I did want to ask more about Banana Pitch Press, for which you’re the founder. It’s an extension of the Banana Pitch Variety Show and it kind of launched simultaneously with Sexy Life, Hello as its first published book. You already talked about it a little bit, but what was it like to publish your debut novella with your own brand new press? 

MK: We became a nonprofit last summer. The more I looked into the publishing industry and for my own book and the more I talked to other creatives, the more I realized I had something big here. The Variety show was becoming more and more successful. We were selling out venues and starting to do bigger shows and talking about doing a traveling show. 

So when my own book was coming out, and I had all these struggles with these publishers and editors, I was just like, What if I use mine as the guinea pig and do the best I can with it? So I started. I got a wonderful intern and design team.  Writing is already hard enough, but the publishing side of things can be so negative and stressful. I didn’t want that. I want it to be exciting and I want the writers on the press to feel like the same stardom that musicians get. Books are cooler than some people realize, and I want to put people on a stage. I want them to be able to perform if they want to. 

We actually just signed our first book. It’s a memoir, and it is by a pretty big person in women's sports, I can say that for now. We’re fast-tracking it. That’s the other thing—normally a book takes like two years to come out, but because of what’s going on with the new administration and certain things especially in her niche in women’s sports, a lot has changed with her organization and her book feels very timely. She’s like, I want it out this year. I want it out this fall. And I’m like, That’s crazy. Let’s do it. 

We’ve also just opened for submissions last month and have had some really exciting stuff come in. And because we’re a nonprofit, we opened for donations. We just need to do unconventional funding and rely on private donors and sponsors and hope to get enough support to put these books out. But I’m pretty excited about it.

JB: You mentioned the current administration, where there’s been a lot of terrible changes happening. Is that something that as a nonprofit you’ve been dealing with? How has that shifted since last year?

MK: At first a couple people—men and unsolicited—were like, Oh, starting a press is going to be hard. Oh, you’re choosing a terrible time to do this, I don’t recommend it. People were coming up to me at a variety show saying, This is going to be too hard, I don’t think you should do it. And I was like, Oh man, you are just putting gasoline on my fire, my friend. 

There’s some grants that are not available to us now. We’re being strategic with our phrasing, but we’re also like, This is motivation to get [new] funding sources. For my book, we did a Kickstarter campaign to start off the base expenses, and I was really grateful that we fulfilled that. We’re going to do at least some form of Kickstarter for the books on the press, as well as some donations from individuals and organizations that are interested in supporting the press. We’re just going to make it happen. 

If anything, it’s more important than ever to be putting out books. Maybe it’s not going to hit you over the head, these aren’t essay-type manifestos exactly, but memorable stories that are giving us something important to think about. I definitely really believe in each of the books that we’re putting out, so I’m excited. 

JB: I know you have a very good teaching motto, “There are no such things as stupid questions, only pretentious instructors.” And Sexy Life, Hello is probably one of the most unpretentious books that I’ve read. As a long-time writing instructor, including with us at Write or Die, what’s one new lesson that you can share from publishing such an unpretentious debut novella?

MK: Oh, what a cool question. For one thing, really leaning into whatever is exciting to you. If you’re not excited about the book, it’s going to be really hard to write and really hard to edit and really hard to talk about it. At first I was afraid of putting Sexy Life, Hello out, because I thought that it would pigeonhole me into some genre. But then I realized, again, you can do whatever you want. I think that’s become a motto for me lately! 

I realized you can do everything. You could do whatever’s interesting. I think that it was really freeing to write this and to be able to talk about it, because I just love this book. I love the story. I love hearing people laughing about it. I was laughing while writing it and reading from it. I love performing from it. So yeah, just don’t think about audience or outcome or marketing, and just think, Do I love it? Like, do I love it? And if I don’t, then I don’t want to do it. With my teaching motto, I should add my publishing motto or my writing motto: you can do whatever you want. 

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Michelle Kicherer covers books and music for the San Francisco Chronicle and Willamette Week. She teaches writing classes in fiction and memoir and always encourages her students to get a little weirder. Her debut novella Sexy Life, Hello is out with Banana Pitch Press.