Published in 2010
278 pages
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart (2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a best book of 2017. In 2018, Febos was the recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has been awarded other prizes and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute, Ragdale, Prairie Schooner, and others. Her essays have recently appeared in Tin House, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Sewanee Review, and The New York Times. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.
What is this book about?
A dark, wild, powerful memoir about a young woman’s transformation from college student to professional dominatrix
While a college student at The New School, Melissa Febos spent four years working as a dominatrix in a midtown dungeon. In poetic, nuanced prose she charts how unchecked risk-taking eventually gave way to a course of self-destruction. But as she recounts crossing over the very boundaries that she set for her own safety, she never plays the victim. In fact, the glory of this memoir is Melissa’s ability to illuminate the strange and powerful truths that she learned as she found her way out of a hell of her own making. Rest assured; the reader will emerge from the journey more or less unscathed.
