THE SECRET LIFE OF A SUBMISSIVE

A British woman’s epiphanic transformation from bored divorcee to kinky, sensual slave.

Anonymous author Sarah K’s novelistic memoir begins sheepishly enough with the author querying her best girlfriends for creative sex scenes to incorporate into an erotic story she’d been writing as “the perfect escape from the realities of a crumbling marriage.” But when she found herself a 40-something, divorced, single mother of three grown children, the writing project effectively stoked the flames of a latent fascination with bondage. Intent on finding the “hero” of her sexual fantasies, the author fumbled through online dating and then met Max, a tall, handsome, entrepreneurial “Dom” who immediately asserts respectful authority with a consensual docility contract and “safe words.” The dom/sub dance began, awkward and fumbling at first, with the placement of an ownership collar, dungeon play and a lingering scene at a kinky dinner party. Yielding to Max’s brinkmanship eventually neutralized her physical insecurities, and the memoir unfurls further through episodes of explicitly described, unbridled surrender. No stranger to the game, Max cautioned her at the onset of their arrangement that a BDSM relationship “changes your life forever.” As her transformative journey progressed, it dramatically redefined the author’s psychological and sexual boundaries, changes she initially found herself resistant to grasp. These boundaries became blurred, however, when the author allowed her romantic love to sully their hierarchal dynamic. Written with verve, Sarah K’s narrative bolsters an already provocative story that is thankfully allowed to play out organically without overextrapolating the base semantics of the BDSM lifestyle.

A titillating story for the Fifty Shades set that plumbs the complex, intimate head space of the sexually submissive.