MADAM, MAY I

A high-end madam revisits her own difficult past when she decides to follow her dreams and face her ambivalence toward her life choices.

Thirty years after her mother’s death, Desdemona Dean wakes up bored and weary. As a high-end madam, she has every material thing she wants, but nothing makes her happy. She cares about her employees and makes sure they’re safe from violence and legal risk, but the older she gets, the more she wonders why she’s still in the game. Her life is so filled with secrecy she’s never had a friend, and no one knows her real name. “There was no part of her life that felt complete.” When Desi decides to further her education, she connects with Loren, a tutor who’s a decade younger, and she finds herself charmed by his positivity, gratitude, and sense of possibility. They enter into a sexual relationship—which starts when she offers to tutor him with her own expertise—that is ultimately derailed when she convinces herself that their differences are too complicated even as she begins to ask herself what will make her happy and makes life changes influenced by his worldview. As she does, she looks back at her life, honoring her strengths and re-evaluating her measures of success, making choices which may lead her back to love and self-respect. Bryant opens up her book with a young Desi holding a Tickle Me Elmo in 1988, an impossibility since the product launched in 1996 yet a good prop for the scene. Much of the book is like this—not quite perfect yet compelling nonetheless, and where Bryant’s writing sometimes lacks polish, Desi’s thought-provoking backstory and transformation keep the reader engaged and sympathetic.

The heroine is the hook, and she rocks it.