The Pittsburgh City Paper ran a little thing today about how I wrote my book about sex.

In case you’re doing last-minute shopping, consider Sex in Recovery as a gift for recovering folks on your list.

Jennifer Matesa has had a lot of Skype conversations about sex, some of them lasting more than three hours. The Friendship-based author recently released Sex in Recovery: A Meeting Between the Covers (Hazelden Publishing). The 220-page nonfiction book ($15.95) includes oral histories from former substance-abusers about the impact of addiction and recovery on their sex lives, between Matesa’s own essays. It’s her second book on a related topic, after the fitness-focused The Recovering Body. She documents her own story about overcoming addiction to prescription painkillers on her blog guineveregetssober.com.

How did you find people to talk to for this book?

I’ve had a blog for six-and-a-half years, so when you have a blog that gets any amount of attention, you meet people on the blog, and they comment, or they email you, and that’s part of my network. [Another] part of my network is recovering people in the city of Pittsburgh. I just put the word out that I was doing this book, and that would lead me to people.

What was the most surprising thing someone told you?

Maria Luz, a trans woman, talked about how she had worked Santa Monica Boulevard [in Los Angeles], which is a notorious tricking place, and how she had been mentored by a drag queen to get into cars and do what guys wanted. In order to do that, she had to get drunk, and in order to live with herself afterward, she had to get wasted. Later in recovery, when she quit drinking and using, she realized …

Read more at the Pittsburgh City Paper.