My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me
Book Review
I wasn’t sure what to expect when this book arrived in my mailbox. The stylized watercolor on the front first lead me to believe it was a graphic novel revolving around semi realistic and completely unrealistic fantasies. Then I feared it would be another smattering of words passing for erotica that would end up in the half-read pile of pulp porn next to my bed. Fortunately I was delighted to find a collection of autobiographical stories exploring dark sides of one man’s kink.
Stephen Elliott writes in short, Hemingway-esque, to the point sentences and switches abruptly but skillfully in and out of scenes of his life. He often flashes back to horrible occurrences, which his BDSM experiences awaken. Each of his crafted stories resemble dreams, where one theme presides and bits of subconscious thoughts blend in with the plot. The reader experiences it as a dream, as a full, rich encounter, but would be hard pressed to explain it and capture all the nuances of each tangent.
As Elliott states in the introduction, the stories are autobiographical, but he would hesitate to call them non-fiction. Most of the stories are to bizarre and graphic to be made up completely, but one gets the impression that some of the scars are covered up rather than opened. It can’t be non-fiction, but it’s certainly not inauthentic.
This book is not for those who are curious about kink; this is for people who already struggle with it as a permanent part of their psyche. Elliott’s characters relive brutal moments of childhood abuse and molestation. The characters remember going in and out of institutions. Elliott frets over the connection between abuse and kink. Most of the stories don’t have happy endings or even endings at all, which he likens to reality.
The BDSM scenes that wind through his Burroughs like life caused a part of me to lick my lips at the rawness and depravity, but the most of me was glad to be on the other side of the text.
The book struggles through each scene, where the protagonist questions why he engages in such torture, how much he hates it, and why he will sooner rather than later seek it out again. The earlier stories depict lost protagonists falling victim to predatory and emotionally bankrupt women. Again, on one hand quite sexy and on the other hand, making the reader question his own mental state.
This book is not for those who are curious about kink; this is for people who already struggle with it as a permanent part of their psyche. Elliott’s characters relive brutal moments of childhood abuse and molestation.
The shining light comes in the second half of the collection where Eden is introduced. She embodies both the extreme diversion from traditional sexual values most commonly found in San Francisco and the way in which such departures can be full of love and tenderness. In “Three Men and a Woman,” Elliot discusses Eden’s dominant role in a polyamourus relationship in her perception of one of the members of the foursome, “Eden refers to David as her pockets. David refers to Eden as her girlfriend.”
Eventually there is a high note, a reward for the emotional rollercoaster. There’s no real waiting for this either. For the impatient and those who need rather instantaneous satisfaction, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me, is a quick 122 page read. It took me about one sitting to go through the whole thing.
Get your copy at Amazon, and check out more on Stephen Elliot on his web page.