Woman describes the moment she found out her dad was a best-selling sex writer

A woman has described the moment she found out her father was a best-selling sex author and it’s as awkward as it sounds.

While rummaging in bookshelves in her family home, Sara Faith Alderman - who grew up in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s, said she found books with illustrations of “buxom women and very excited-looking men sitting on each other’s laps and kissing”.

Speaking to the BBC, she said: “I saw on the title page of one of the books ‘by Ira Alterman’ - which was my father’s name, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, what do you mean? My dad doesn’t write books.’”

“It was so confusing and I didn’t have any time to process it because I needed to very quickly put the books away,” she said..

“It took me a while to understand that, yes, my dad had written these sexy, naughty books that I wasn’t supposed to look at.”

She did not tell her dad that she had found them but she has since discovered her father’s books have sold millions of copies around the world and been translated into many languages.

“I think that most children have this moment where they realise that their parents are not untouchable people, they’re not superheroes, they aren’t all-knowing - and that might come at the same time as the revelation where kids understand, ‘Oh my gosh, my parents had sex, had sex to have me, they probably still have it,’” she said.

Yeats later, her dad discussed the books with her and even asked her to help edit them. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's’. “People with Alzheimer’s tend to lose their social graces,” Sara said.

“I didn’t even do much of the writing - it was mostly editing and giving him thorough feedback, he would call me with ideas for new books or chapters about whatever sex trend or position or whatever he was thinking about at the time,” she added.

“I would have to field these calls and advise him, or he would send me printed-out manuscripts of his books and I would go through and edit them and play creative collaborator, even though I was doing it sometimes literally with one eye closed.”