About A. S. Gray

A. S. Gray is an internationally acclaimed author of various works, including original essays.

A. S. Gray lives and works in Milan and Los Angeles. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Do you remember the first moment that made you think that women - especially older women - belonged at the center of erotic stories? I recall stumbling on “Story of O” by Anne Desclos and “Delta of Venus” by Anaïs Nin as a teenager. I turned the pages with those trembling fingers of adolescence. Earlier still, I once walked in on a TV left humming in an empty room, two bodies kissing on the screen, chaste but illicit. My cheeks went up in flames. Much later, I realised that we had endless tales about young bodies, young hunger, young urgency, but almost none about the wild, molten lives of older women. Women who had lived. Women with desire that didn’t flicker but burned low and hot. Women with entire galaxies of desire inside them. I thought, why aren’t they the heroines?

How did these early impressions shape your stories? They reminded me to be bold, not polite. I wanted the stories to feel unhidden, the way women rarely allow themselves to be. So I wrote about women in their forties, fifties, sixties. Women who know themselves by touch, by memory, by scars. Women who carried grief, humour, rage, erotic astonishment. Women who have been loved, ignored, demanded, worshipped, dismissed. I didn’t want to glorify youth. I wanted to honour the women who’ve lived enough to know exactly what they want, and long enough to be surprised when they still want more.

Where did the stories themselves come from? From overheard conversations. From the woman in the grocery aisle touching someone’s arm too thoughtfully. From the friend who confessed, in half a whisper, that she hadn’t been touched in seven years and wasn’t sure she remembered how. Sometimes a story came from an object - a silk slip folded in a drawer, a hotel key card someone forgot to return. Sometimes from the way a woman sat. Spine straight, or defeated, or daring someone to test her.

Were you surprised by the emotional tone the stories took on? Constantly. I began expecting mischief, and instead found ache. I expected heat and instead found tenderness that embarrassed even me. Older women don’t enter their erotic lives lightly. They enter with history, with broken promises, with whole chapters of silence. Their desire is never just desire. It’s memory, rebellion, grief, reclamation. One story began as a joke about a woman flirting at her Pilates class and ended with her standing naked in her bathroom, seeing herself kindly for the first time in decades. Another started as a revenge tale and turned into a love letter. So yes, I was surprised, humbled and sometimes a little devastated.

Did you see yourself in any of the protagonists? Of course I did. The one who takes what she wants, teeth bared, and the one who waits for permission that never comes. Both crept into these stories. I didn’t intend to write myself, but each woman - the professor who finds her old lover, the empty-nest mother who discovers a hunger she thought had expired - they all borrowed my heart for a paragraph or two. Writing them felt like undressing in front of my own mirror. Revealing, uncomfortable, necessary.

What did you learn about desire while writing these stories? The world tries to shrink older women, tuck them away like letters in a drawer, but their inner lives expand, riotously, beautifully, sometimes frighteningly. I learned that erotic life is not a young woman’s currency. It’s a human one, and women over forty often spend it with more precision, more imagination, more gratitude. Mature women are so rarely written as erotic beings that simply granting them that room on the page felt almost revolutionary. Desire is a multitude.

What do you hope the stories offer readers? I hope they open a window. I hope older women read these stories and feel seen - not as mothers, not as caretakers, not as wise elders, but as creatures of want, bravery, joy. I hope younger women read them and feel relieved that desire doesn’t expire, it simply deepens. Most of all, I hope someone - somewhere - feels less alone in the quiet, secret chambers of their body.