Tess Pollok interviews Jon Raymond about his new novel, “God and Sex.” 
God and Sex by Jon Raymond. Simon & Schuster, 2025. 256 pages.
JON RAYMOND’S God and Sex reads almost like two stories instead of one. The novel begins with Arthur, a middle-aged novelist of little significance, who finds his passion for life reignited when he begins an affair with his best friend’s wife, a school librarian named Sarah. But just as their secret threatens to rupture her marriage and upend both their lives, a devastating wildfire sweeps through town and burns away this domestic plot. What was initially an intimate portrait of three friends in a regrettable love triangle morphs into a grander philosophical meditation on God, reality, and the power of love and faith. God and Sex is appropriately titled, connecting the delicate tragedy of our own interpersonal lives with the brutal, challenging tragedy of what’s become of our world.
I spoke with Raymond over Zoom to discuss his reasons for writing the book, his longstanding interest in climate change and New Age spiritualism, and how he drew inspiration from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951) while writing God and Sex.
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TESS POLLOK: What made you interested in writing about nature and God?
JON RAYMOND: My interest in God dates back to college when I discovered the writings of the fourth-century Greek mystic Dionysius the Areopagite. He’s the progenitor of what people call “negative theology,” or the apophatic tradition, which is the understanding of God as an unnamable and unknowable nonentity. It’s the idea that the best way of describing God is through non-attribution; he’s not this and he’s not that. It’s a way of thinking that’s been kicking around my head for decades and has found its way into my fiction and screenwriting. I saw this book, God and Sex, as a way of exploring that more directly. Some of it does specifically show up in the book through the mention of figures like Meister Eckhart, Aquinas, and Heidegger. Beyond that, nature has always been a huge presence in my life. I like to think I have the same sense of animism as most people from the West Coast.
I know that Dionysian rituals, like the mystery cults, had a much bigger influence on early Christianity and other Abrahamic religions than many people realize.
Exactly. There are undercurrents of Gnostic traditions in a lot of religions. You find it in Sufism, in Zen. This kind of religious thinking is bound up with absence and unknowing.
When do you feel spirituality in your life? How do you engage with spiritual practice?
It all feels so embarrassing to talk about! My dad was a practicing Buddhist in a California sort of way. He meditated every morning and struck a little bell. I think his practice of sitting and concentrating every day has had a huge impact on my life as a writer. It’s probably during my writing time that my spiritual practice manifests, if you could call it that. Not that I plug in and just immediately start feeling spiritual feelings, but writing is when I become aware of something numinous.
My parents were involved in several countercultural things. There was a lot of Sufism in my household, a lot of general New Agery. I’m not into organized religion, but at a certain point, I realized that New Age thinking basically is my organized religious tradition. My religious training, as such, has been an amalgamation of West Coast alternative spiritualities.
You poke fun at that West Coast mentality in the book, especially with the “re-greening” characters who are individually restoring a single meadow as a means of fighting climate change. It’s certainly not changing the world like they think it is, but what’s the alternative?
That’s my inner monologue all the time. I could sit around hating people and judging them and feeling cynical all day long, but what’s the alternative to that? In the case of those characters in the book, at least they’re involved in doing something productive. They are tending their own little garden. I don’t know if it’s a scalable model, but I appreciate people attempting things like that.
The book is inspired by and draws heavily on the plot of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. What do you find compelling about Graham Greene? Why were you inspired by that book, specifically?
I find Graham Greene really strange. He had a peculiar Catholicism that maybe doesn’t qualify as actual Catholicism—it was more of a personal, heretical set of obsessions that loosely resembled Catholicism. God and Sex follows a similar pattern to that of The End of the Affair: they’re both about a love triangle that culminates in a possible miracle in which one of the lovers is resuscitated from death. But The End of the Affair takes place in London during the Blitz and has a much more corrosive, existentialist tone. He was a dark writer, Greene, which I admire, but it’s not something that I’m as capable of doing. I wanted to migrate the situation presented in The End of the Affair to a setting that had more to do with the West Coast New Age movement that I was describing earlier. Many of the ideas from Greene’s book—forming a personal relationship with God, engaging in magical thinking, questioning fate and reality—seem totally amenable to how people think and act in Southern Oregon. The template of The End of the Affair is very much underneath God and Sex.
What’s so exceptional about Graham Greene’s Catholicism?
I’ve always felt like it mostly had to do with the fact that he was bored. He was trying to create a way of living in which everything around him had a certain dire religious feeling, trying to place himself in some kind of crucible of doubt and faith within the context of his own life. Not that this ever stopped him from doing anything he wanted to do; he was famously an adventure-seeking philanderer and a borderline suicidal character who went out of his way to endanger himself. I just think all of it comes out of how bored he felt.
You’ve written several novels, as well as screenplays. How is one writing process different from the other?
On a certain level, they’re very similar. There’s a symbiosis between film and literature going back to the very beginning of film. Film has learned so much of its narrative structure from the novel. The novel writing I do is very focused on scene-making, pacing, and duration, but when I’m writing a screenplay, structure is basically my only concern. When you’re screenwriting, you’re creating an armature that other people are going to come in and paint over and flesh out in different ways. You come up with characters, with scenes and scenarios, but that’s it. Writing a novel is much more work because you have to do everything yourself. You’re the gaffer and the costume department and everything. Writing sentences that flow from one into the next is not necessary with screenwriting. The labor and craftsmanship involved in writing a short story or even a paragraph can be way more than an entire script.
The novel is deeply concerned with climate change, which presents a major point of crisis in the book. I would imagine, given that you live in Oregon and there have been a lot of wildfires there recently, that you’ve had some lived experiences with natural disasters and climate change.
Yeah—2020 was apocalyptic for a number of reasons, including COVID-19, the rise of fascism, the BLM protests, and wildfires. Portland became this theater of fascist and anti-fascist street fighting for over 100 nights in a row. The megafires capped it all off. The fire that’s described in the book is a fire that actually happened here and left Portland in a giant smoke ball for over a week. That experience triggered not only this book but also my previous book, Denial, which was about a journalist in the future who tracks down a petroleum executive wanted for crimes against life. It’s a Nazi hunter–style story in an ecological, speculative fiction costume. The megafires were a profound experience for me and clearly one that we’re going to experience more and more as time goes on.
Was it an intensive research process? Were you interviewing people involved in fighting the fire, or were you just living in Portland when it happened?
I went online to read articles and essays written by firefighters. My neighbor is a firefighter and I ran an early draft by him. The fire wasn’t here in Portland, so I experienced it secondhand. But I knew that for the book, I had to focus on creating a full-on forest fire experience.
I was out in Eastern Oregon with my family a couple of weeks ago and there was just this haze of smoke high in the air. I realized that this is how it’s going to be every year. It’s hard explaining to my kids that it wasn’t always that way. We’ve always had fires, but we never used to have this level of smoke during the late summer and early fall. It’s all insane.
Who’s culpable in the climate crisis?
Everyone is and no one is, you know? That’s what my last book was about: assigning blame, the idea of a Nuremberg trial for petroleum executives, a global Green New Deal. We’re all burning gas, we’re all eating meat. It’s a collective failure that’s going on, and rationing the blame is actually pretty complicated. On the other hand, I think sometimes you do need to select someone to be responsible so you can punish them. If everyone is guilty, is no one guilty? I don’t know.
As much as the book revolves around climate change, it also revolves around miracles and magical thinking. Do you see a relationship between the two?
I would say so. I think we have reached a point with climate change where it’s a daily part of our lives. It’s a thrumming emergency behind everything, and which occasionally shifts into acute catastrophe. In this way, it’s a good backdrop for a story about a mystical current that only occasionally manifests in lived experience. For me, the book was about approaching and describing a miracle in the most realistic terms that I could. If something happened to me that I couldn’t comprehend, how long would it take me to whittle that experience down into something I could understand and live with every day? And for how long would I believe it at all?
There’s a great book by Philip K. Dick called VALIS. There’s a miracle in that book too, although it happens in a much more schizoid manner—but it’s sort of the same question as my book: did this really happen? In VALIS, it’s about a medical problem that no one can understand, and a great, unknowable truth that’s revealed, and then this rabbit hole of is this real, is this not real, what even is reality? Miracles are interesting plot devices for reality-testing in this way. I think we’re engaged, nationally and globally, in a pretty major reassessment of what constitutes reality right now. That’s something I wanted to address, less in a topical political way than in a religious way. Miracles are an interesting way to see what happens when someone’s basic sense of reality is undone.
Ideologically, we’ve had so many mirror reversals over the past 10, 15 years, it’s truly insane. It turns out ideologies are so fungible that you can turn them totally inside out. When Donald Trump started promoting Make America Healthy Again, I was amazed because that’s all the hippie shit my New Age parents were talking about years ago. Why do I find it repugnant when RFK Jr. says things that my mom has said her entire life?
What was the process of writing and editing like for you?
It’s just sitting at a desk all day long and you can’t really tell how much time passes. The book took a couple years of active writing. My editor critiqued it initially because he said that if the title was going to be God and Sex, there had to be more sex in it. I liked being prompted to write more salaciously about sex.
How do you relate God to sex?
In real life, not that much. But in the book, the title God and Sex is spoken by the protagonist’s mother when she’s on the phone. She’s describing how people commune with the divine, and she says that it’s a much more embodied experience for women; it’s about sex. And for men, it’s more about voices, hearing God and receiving messages from outer space. It’s not something I necessarily believe to be true, but it’s something I heard once that I thought was an interesting idea. It’s a very gendered binary of the divine experience.
You’ve been writing novels for almost 20 years now. Have your obsessions and motivations changed over time, or do you see yourself as being consistently drawn to the same themes?
Friendship has always been a big element in my writing. I’ve always felt that friendship was underexamined in literature, even if that’s not actually true. To me, friendship has always been more interesting to examine than family relationships or other kinds of relationships because there’s an equality to it. I also made the decision, a bit arbitrarily, to write in a regionalist mode. I thought it seemed unfashionable and stupid, but it turns out it’s also how a lot of fiction is made. People paying attention to their own neighborhood, their own backyard. That’s led me to think about stories within a certain geography. My film work and fiction feel like they’re in the same universe that way. As I’ve gotten older, history has moved along and my sense of rage has shifted a bit, but the basic posture remains the same.
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Jon Raymond is the author of five works of fiction, including the Oregon Book Award–winning story collection Livability (2008) and the Oregon Book Award–nominated novel Denial (2022). As a screenwriter, he has collaborated on numerous films with director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and First Cow (2019). He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011) directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and many other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Featured image: Photo of Jon Raymond by Michael Palmieri.
LARB Contributor
Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor of Animal Blood Magazine. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.
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