"Deep Throat" by Claire Dowling

"Deep Throat" by Claire Dowling (2004, 16 pages)

Year III

March 1 to March 31

Claire Dowling

Dublin

Event Resources- 

One of my goals during Irish Short Story Month Year III is to read a lot of new to be writers.  There is certainly no shortage of option!   Irish writers do not just produce award winning books and short stories, they also stock the best seller sections of the book stories of the world.   Many of these works are in the genre of literature often referred to as "chick lit".   Maybe these stories are not discussed in coffee shops on Grafton Street,  deconstructed at the Sorbonne or used as role models in creative writing seminars but their authors sell millions of  books.   Many authors of best sellers have short stories included in the anthology Irish Girls are Back in Town.   All of the authors are from Ireland and most have obtained great commercial success so they must be doing something right.  

Most of the stories in the anthology revolve around the relationships of the women in the stories to the men in their lives.   In "Deep Throat" the wife in the story got her husband a digital cable TV pack for his birthday.   He loved it, he can get all the sports shows he likes.  In fact he seems to like it more than going to bed with  her.   Once when she tells him she would love "a back rub", their code expression, he says he will be up as soon as the game is over.   She waits and waits then comes down and finds him asleep in front of the TV.

It gets worse, one night she walks in on him watching pornography. The man stutters out some explanation about how he was channel surfing and just stayed on it for a minute but he knows he is in deep trouble.      At first she is terribly shocked and hurt, while does he prefer women on TV to her.   She talks to her girl friends about it.   They ask her what the people in the video were doing and she gives them a description of a German couple, the man well endowed and the woman with very large breasts engaging in some pretty robust sexual activity.  One of the women in the group seems in shock from the description .

 The next day he leaves for work way early and stays out until late.  He slings in the door ready to take some serious abuse.  Instead he gets the shock of his life when his wife suggest they might spice up their lives by watching it together.   He ends up giving her a lecture  on how shocked he is by this and storms up stairs.  She stays down and watches it.  Then she invites her friends, all married women to watch it with her.  At first they are all shocked then they get into it.   Soon they are making sexual demands on their husbands and also making up reasons to go out to watch the programs.   The husband now feels he occupies the moral high ground.   

The ending is really a fun twist.  I really enjoyed this story a lot.  

Author Data

Clare Dowling trained as an actress and began acting and writing plays with theatre company Glasshouse Productions, of which she was a founder member. She went on to write six plays, short films, children’s stories, drama, and novels.
She has published Fast Forward, Expecting Emily andAmazing Grace with Poolbeg and Headline in the UK, and she has been a scriptwriter with Fair City for the past seven years. She lives in Dublin with her family.

You can find out more about her work on her website.  

Mel u