Sorry, Rebecca Woolf.

On a flight back from Miami a few weeks ago, I was a glass of merlot into the trip and reading Rebecca Woolf’s “From Wild to Child” on my Kindle. I was super engrossed in her memoir about being a first time mom at 23, and was feeling a massive connection with her as she, like me, was about to marry a funny bald man. I hopped up to stretch my legs and bother the awful flight attendant for another bottle of wine, and then snuggled back into my book.

There had been a few “matoor” PG-13 moments in Ms. Woolf’s book, but suddenly she went from being edgy-yet-ladylike about her affairs, to using terms like “hot cockhead” and “fucking asshole.” (But like, imagine asshole as a medical term, not as an insult.) I vacillated between respecting her for being so forward and honest, and then feeling just super uncomfortable because the dude in the story was some freak named Jack, and not Hal, the loving father of her child.

This went on for about fifteen minutes. I was so surprised the book took this turn that I woke my ill friend in the seat next to me and read a few sentences aloud until she looked around wide-eyed and told me to shuthefuckup. “But this is about bukkake!” I insisted. “One chapter ago she was sad that she couldn’t connect to the other moms at the playground and now she’s— bukkake-ing. With people who aren’t her husband.”

I finally opted to give up because sorry, if I’m going to read smut it certainly isn’t going to be on the 8:05pm Southwest flight from Miami to Baltimore. Days later I turned on my Kindle, ready to give it another go, hoping that the clever writing and funny anecdotes would return, and that she at some point would exhaust the litany of disgusting, depraved sex tales imbedded in her story.

As my purchased books loaded, I noticed that the 99 cent “women’s erotica” book I’d bought as a joke for the other member of this blog had been sent electronically to my kindle, and not mailed to my house as a tangible thing I could give to her at an embarrassing moment. Like, say, while she was at work, or picking out her wedding venue.

Annoyed with Amazon, I re-opened “From Wild to Child” and was happy to see the story had come back from its nasty, sexual U-turn.

I am not kidding when I tell you it took me about a half hour to realize I had been reading the wrong book on the plane. The “women’s erotica” had uploaded itself right beneath my intended book, and my chubby, wine-soaked plane fingers accidentally took me on a literary pansexual nightmare, beginning with the woes of a young mom sweetly trying to reclaim her femininity, to a fucking all-male whore ranch in Topanga Canyon.

This is the real problem with e-books. You can say you’re a purist and love real books because of how they smell and feel and sound as you turn the real pages with your real fingers, etc, etc, getoveryourself, etc, but I think the issue at hand is clear. People are (maybe without even knowing it) terrified of accidental porn.

(ps, the author also write a blog that makes me think you’d have to be both clinically insane and really, really cool to have kids and you should read it too.)