Figs & Ass

I discovered to MY HORROR last year that I hadn’t read a book in its entirety since A Million Little Pieces more than a year previous. For me, this is just not acceptable. Afraid that I would someday find myself relegated to Archie comics and People magazine, one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2008 was to read more.

I never thought I would become the non-fiction type of gal, but I cannot get enough of the memoir these days. Maybe it’s because I have always associated non-fiction writing with droning World War II epics or because I read Gorillas in the Mist in high school as part of our ‘Non-Fiction Unit’ and found the subject and the narrative so boring that it was as dry as reading a calculus textbook. Snore! (Mind you, my aversion for non-fiction may have nothing at all to do with its genre and more to do with the traumatic memory associated with Gorillas in the Mist, which someday , fair readers, I may share with you.)

No matter the origin, I now really find that nothing is more interesting than the true story of people’s lives. And if those lives involve sex or travelling or food in some way, shape or form (and let's face it, how could they not?) then I am all over it like a Congressman on a hooker. These days, I have more or less set up camp in the biography section of the bookstore.

So is it any surprise that the story of a chef-turned-dominatrix be of the utmost intrigue to me? Don’t know what to get that hard-to-buy for person on your list? Well then, fair reader, let me introduce Concertina: The life and loves of a dominatrix.

The biggest surprise about this book is how literary it is. It is a smart account by first-time author Susan Winemaker of a life that took some unusual twists and turns. I have been munching and licking my way through this book for about six weeks now. On the back burner, a slow simmer, it came (ahem) to boil on a number of occasions. But banish the thought that this book is all about tits and ass. Well, it is. And it is also multi-faceted and layered and touching.

Anyone looking for easy jokes and cheap laughs won't get them here. Though it does go into some pretty gruesome details of life as a dominatrix—horrifying and titillating beyond even my own imagination—it is also a love story and a book about a woman finding her way in the world.

I have this habit of dog-earing pages with passages or words I love. There are some books where no pages are dog-eared and others where almost every page is folded over for future indulgence.

Here are some of the fabulous words that jumped out at me from my dog-eared pages:

supine
truncated
effete
inscrutable
bellicosity
hirsute
akimbo
timorous
lissome
alacrity
serpentine
lascivious
doleful
elegiac
maudlin
dastardly
laconic
flummoxed
askance
fey
abjured
oblique
loquacious

Yep, that's her book in a nutshell. She describes beauty in a way that resonates with me: “My beauty was not structurally perfect; it was contingent upon the angle, the lighting, my attitude, my state of mind” because that's more or less how I have always characterized my own looks.

Sentences such as : “His delicacy was in risible contrast to his leviathan physique” and the characterizations give Margaret Atwood a run for her money. Meet Adam the Masochist, Enema Larry, Electrics Bob, TV Mike, Plastic Man and Trousers Dan. Men begging to be dominated and humiliated walk among us like normal, functioning human beings masking their lacy thong underwear, their scrotal bruises and their flaking nipples.

This is just as much a book about food as it is about sex, but with sentences like: “All theses savoury, salacious visions: orgies of food, outlandish contortions, vegetable perversions, exploding juices” it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between the two.