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This year's Purple Prose Award goes to...The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, by Rebecca Miller

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Rebecca Miller is doing her best to single-handedly make up for all the vapid mactresses in this world: she's a director, screenwriter, artist, actress, short story writer, and novelist who wrote and directed the films The Ballad of Jack and Rose and Personal Velocity. Oh yeah, and she's the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and the wife of Daniel Day Lewis. But after reading her most recent novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, we think we've found her Achilles heel: writing sex scenes. Don't get us wrong: we enjoyed the book--it's a lovely story of a woman figuring out who she is after a few happy decades of being Wife and Mother. And for the most part, it's beautifully written--even when the story moves to a shady basement SM club. But this scene, when (spoiler alert, sorry) a menopausal Pippa Lee sleeps with a 30-something ex-missionary turned slacker, was a serious needle-off-the-record moment. The dude in question, who has a massive Christ figure tattooed on his chest, has just wooed Pippa into the back of his pick-up truck, which is decorated with tea light candles:

"She felt his hand on her sex. She opened her eyes. The tattoo loomed over her; the wings of the Christ seemed to spread wide and real above her, pulsing up and down, making the sound of two dry hands rubbing against each other as they brushed the sides of the plastic shell. This can't be real, she thought. And then, out of nowhere, a pleasure ballooned from her sex, swelled to fill her body until it burst, the sensation running down her legs, and she cried out, her head falling lifeless on the mattress, her body lank as the neck of a dead swan. Sadness trailed behind the pleasure like the tail of a comet. Grief and rage shot out of her mouth like flames. He held her head between his palms as she sobbed."

Okay, so she lost us when she used "sex" as a noun. That may be a sin worse than "panties." Actually, it may even be worse than "moist panties." And then "a pleasure ballooned from her sex"?! Also, since when can a sensation run down one's legs? Props to Ms. Miller for including female ejaculation in her novel--and a 50-something woman ejaculating, no less--but did she really have to call it "the pleasure"? In honor of this excerpt, we'd like to officially dub needle-off-the-record sex scenes such as this "jumping the dead swan."

Check out Glamour's 16 sexy, sneaky acts of seduction to get him into the mood!

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Related: sex book, romance novel

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