Sewell worked as a punch-press operator in Cleveland before getting a master’s degree in philosophy. I’d Rather Eat Chocolate is her first book. She and Kip, who have been together for 10 years and married for eight, now live in Seattle. We spoke by phone one evening last month while Kip was at the local diner.

—Sara Lipka

Joan Sewell

So you'd really rather have a brownie than an orgasm?

You know, that’s actually a tough one, and I’ll tell you why. When I reach an orgasm, I’m so proud of myself that it kind of overcomes the brownie. But as far as gratification, the brownie is always there. I have to work for my orgasms.

And the brownie you can just pick up at the bakery?

Oh, yeah. I mean I don’t have to say, “Was that brownie as good for you as it was for me?” And I don’t have to think, I’m almost near the brownie, I’m almost near it, oop, here it is! I got the brownie. And that type of thing. Having an orgasm—I do have orgasms—is more like an award. I’ve planted the flag on Everest. But as far as the effort to get there, a lot of times it’s not worth it.

Have you ever liked sex, or thought you did?

Yeah. But the problem with it was that even when I was dating, as a teenager and older, it was difficult. Even if I liked sex, the guy I was with always liked it more. I always felt like I was playing defense.

At what point did you decide to write a book about it?

Well, it wasn’t until Oprah. I saw a show, in 2000 or so, and she was saying millions and millions of women are having problems with sexual dysfunction, and they’re all ashamed to say anything about it. It was brought up by her gynecologist, who said the most prevalent problem she heard was women with low libidos. And this study had just come out from the University of Chicago. I looked at the study, I actually went to the library and looked at it, and then I looked at a Kinsey study, and I was thinking, well, if so many tens of millions of women—estimated—are having problems, and they’re saying that’s nearly half, what is the basis for normality? What is the definition of dysfunction? And what standards are we using?

What did Kip think?

He encouraged me. He encouraged me a lot. Because I was always spouting off this crap, you know. What I’d learned and everything. And he goes, “Why don’t you just sit down and write about it?” But at that point he didn’t know that everything we were going to go through would be part of it. And then he got a little squeamish about it. He still encouraged it, but there were times he was like, “This is a lot for me. This is very personal. I don’t know if I want people reading about this.”

How did you convince him?

Well, I understood it, too. I had my own problems with it. But it was kind of at that point a driving force. And he said, “Go ahead, but let me read it. And if there’s something I truly object to, will you respect that?” And that was hard, because I wanted to tell the truth, and yet I didn’t want him upset. So it was a very fine line. But he was a lot more accepting than I thought. He saw it as a project of passion for me, and he always wanted me to get some passion in my life. Partly sexually, but also vocationally. So I think he let me go ahead with a lot of stuff. Still, sometimes he would say, “Oh, do we have to put that in there?”