About
What Forbidden Spice Is
Forbidden Spice is literary autofiction about an impossible love affair — a 48-year age gap, two continents, and the specific weight of a white man and an African woman in a world that has strong opinions about that.
It is told in two voices. Mark’s — rendered desire, explicit description, the perspective of a man who rebuilt himself at sixty-seven and arrived at seventy-three certain he understood what was happening. And Sofia’s — razor-sharp interior counterpoint, her corrections to his narrative, the perspective of a woman arriving at her own power at the precise moment he thought he’d found peace.
The book is explicit. Not because it courts controversy, but because the desire was the thread that survived everything else — the thing they returned to when language failed, when pride was in the way, when the world outside had made itself impossible. There is no honest version of this story that isn’t explicit.
The cities are real. The age gap is real. The dual voice is real. “Most of this happened.” What Mark invented — and what actually happened — is the question the book asks you to hold as you read.
Why It Exists
Forbidden Spice exists because stories about desire, age, and power are almost always told from one perspective — and that perspective is rarely honest. This book is both perspectives, simultaneously, disagreeing with each other in real time.
It exists because older men deserve to see themselves as protagonists who transform, not spectators who decline. Because younger women’s agency deserves to be centered, not assumed. Because the space between “he created her” and “she chose to become” is where the truth actually lives.
It exists because some readers want literary fiction that is also genuinely erotic. Because “literary erotica” doesn’t have to mean euphemism. Because the body speaks when language fails, and that deserves the same craft as any other form of truth-telling.
From the Foreword
Before I tell you what happened between us, I should tell you what was happening in the world that made it possible.
Older men — particularly older white men — have been handed a clear cultural instruction in recent years: your time is done. Step back. Stop taking up space. The desire you still carry is an imposition. The women you notice don’t want to be noticed by you. You are not a potential lover, you are a problem to be managed. The polite version of this is called “being age-appropriate.” The honest version is erasure. I understand why the instruction exists.
I simply chose not to follow it.
And then there is the generation she came from. Young men raised on pornography and the dopamine slot machines of dating apps, who arrive in relationships with no emotional vocabulary and no financial capacity and no real desire for the sustained work that intimacy requires. Men who hunt, and fuck, and move on — and then return, baffled, when the woman they treated as interchangeable stops being available. The apps formalized this into mathematics: the top ten to fifteen percent of men receive nearly all the attention, and use it to cycle through women who receive nothing in return except the education of being discarded. The women who didn’t give up entirely on dating arrived, eventually, at a kind of furious pragmatism. Sofia arrived there at twenty-two.
We found each other in the gap between those two worlds. A man who refused to disappear and a woman who refused to settle. That is the most neutral way I can describe what happened. It is also, I suspect, the most honest.
Here is what actually happened.
The cities are real — Lisbon, Cyprus, Budapest, Ayia Napa, Granada, and finally the Adriatic on a ship we both now refer to as the cruise from hell. The forty-eight-year age gap is real. The dual voice is real: Sofia wrote her sections — some from scratch, some in response to passages she felt I had got wrong about her. The desire, the jealousy, the shame — all real, in both directions.
Here is what I would have you understand before you begin. When we met, I was seventy years old and white. She was twenty-two and African. After retirement, divorce and impotence at sixty-seven I took the decision to rebuild and reinvent myself: mindset, body, libido, hunger, the refusal to become invisible. I was part way through that transformation when we met. Better, but unfinished.
At twenty-two, Sofia was arriving at her own crossroads. Beautiful, but manipulated and insecure. Shaped by men who preferred her smaller. Who got more from her that way. Men who had never bothered to give her an orgasm. Their pleasure, not hers.
She wanted to break out, but didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to continue, but needed better company.
We collided with the specific force of two people who have each decided, separately, that they have nothing left to lose. I was wrong about that. So was she, in different ways.
What held us together — through the shame, the infidelities, the forty-eight-year gap, and the specific weight of a white man and an African woman in a world that had strong opinions about that — was the incredible sex and the mutual caring. That sounds reductive. I mean it precisely. The desire was the thread that survived everything else: the thing we returned to when language failed, when pride was in the way, when the world outside had made itself impossible. This book is explicit about that because there is no honest version of this story that isn’t.
People will have opinions about what we are to each other. About the age gap, the money, the desire. Some of those opinions will be right. I have tried to see what we are from the outside as clearly as I could, while still being helplessly the man inside it.
She agreed to tell her side. That she did so at all is the thing I cannot fully explain right now.
The only fact I’d ask you to hold onto as you read.
Mark Harde
Lisbon, 2026