Whip Smart The True Story of a Secret Life [Paperback]

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.

In her provocative debut&Febos pulls no punches as she describes in minute, and at times horrific, detail her working life&In lesser hands this could be a maudlin, salacious tale, but Febos's electrifying prose and unremitting honesty continually challenge the reader. Expertly captures grace within depravity. Kirkus Reviews

Febos's debut about her four years working as a dominatrix at a midtown Manhattan dungeon cuts a sharp line between prurience and feminist manifesto&In this emotionally stark, excoriating work, Febos mines the darkest, most troubling aspects of human interaction. Publisher's Weekly

Febos can really write, and it is the narrative voice she inhabits, at once honest and dispassionate, curious and even idealistic, that turns a timeworn story into a smart, provocative thrill-ride of a book&For all its jaw-dropping shock value...Whip Smart is, in the end, a treatise on the psychology of sex and power, subversion and submissionhumanity. David Goodwillie for The Daily Beast

Memoirs about salacious adventures have two requirements: they must be generous with the goods and astute with the analysis. Febos delivers on both, and with relish. No saltyl#.