Typerotica
Lee Siegel
ISBN 978-1-944521097, August 1, 2020
Softcover, 222 pages, 6.6 x 9.6 in.
Typerotica is a hilariously comedic and poignantly nostalgic portrait of an aspiring artist as a young man. Consisting of the typed manuscripts of two love stories—QWERTYUIOP and AZERTYUIOP—it illustrates an analogy: typing was once to literature what sex is to love.
As a fifteen-year old, Lee Siegel is dazzled by a then contraband copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and decides that he must become a writer. He imagines that in order to do that he needs to learn how to type and then go to Paris to drink French wine, smoke French cigarettes, and have sex with French women. Imagining, furthermore, that in order to become a writer of compelling literature he needs to learn how to type, he enrolls in a typing class at a secretarial college in Los Angeles and falls in love with the typing teacher.
The two stories are framed by nonfictional introductions and annotations, including a true account of the author’s friendship with Henry Miller.