How a young girl found out the dad was the best-selling sex writer

Sara Faith Alterman was close to her father, an outwardly strait-laced, prudish man. Then she learned he was concealing a secret.

Growing up near Boston, Massachusetts, during the 1980s, Sara always felt a special bond with her dad, Ira.

“My father and I were very much alike,” she says. “We even look a lot alike, which is funny to me now that a little girl could look like, you know, a 40-year-old Jewish man. We had the same facial features and the same hair and so I kind of wanted to emulate him.”

Ira would always be the person she would go to if she had a problem that needed solving. He passed on to Sara and her brother his love of language and wordplay – he’d worked as a newspaper journalist before going into marketing, and family road trips would be spent playing word games, or coming up with puns and rhymes.

“I wanted to be like him in so many ways,” she says. “So I absorbed a lot from those games we played in the car. I really found it fun to twist words and come up with new things – it felt like a weird dad-skill that a lot of my friends didn’t have.”

Sara’s parents were passionate about puzzles and organising scavenger hunts. What they didn’t like was anything they felt might threaten their children’s innocence – so all adult topics were completely taboo, especially sex.

“My parents behaved as though those things did not exist,” she says. “I don’t think I ever heard my father use the word ‘sex’ until I was in my 30s.”

It was worse if they were watching a television show or a film that included a love scene.

“My father would say, “Euch!” and he would leap up to either change the channel as fast as he could or he would eject the tape from the VCR,” says Sara.

“Sometimes, if he couldn’t figure out the knob on the TV fast enough, he would just unplug it.

“I think he didn’t want to answer questions about it. I also think he found it very uncomfortable to sit in a room with his children while there was something a little bit sexy happening.”

But one day, when she was eight, Sara made a discovery that challenged everything she thought she knew about him.

Alone in the den room of the family home and bored with the book she was reading, Sara began rummaging among the bookshelves. Until now she’d been too short to reach the uppermost shelves, but now she found she was just about able to do it.

In the very top-right corner, she noticed that hidden behind some other books was a cluster of brightly coloured paperbacks, packed tightly together and clearly intended to be concealed from view. “I thought: ‘Well obviously this is what I’m going to look at,'” says Sara. She reached past the ones in front and grabbed a handful.

They were unlike any books Sara had seen before.

Their covers showed illustrations of “buxom women and very excited-looking men sitting on each other’s laps and kissing”, she recalls – if they’d appeared on the family TV, her father would have changed the channel immediately. Many of the titles had the word “sex” in them – the tamer ones included How To Pick Up Girls and The Sex Manual For People Over 30.

At this point, Sara heard her parents were coming. She knew she wasn’t meant to be looking at these books, so she went to put them back. But then she noticed something that completely threw her.

“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.'” BBC