Book Review: My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, by Stephen Elliott

Reviewer: Mathilde Madden

Through a series of linked mostly-autobiographical stories, Stephen Elliott reveals scenes from a life of a sexually submissive, abuse-surviving writer.

Misery memoir and erotic memoir are both hot genres right now. This book could have been either, but it refuses to conform. In the introduction, we are told that too much of it is knowingly fictionalised for it to be non-fiction - and in that statement exists the sly subtextual aside that this is truly the case for every book packaged as a memoir. My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up refuses to be merely a catalogue of a horrific childhood, or a look-at-the-shit-I'm-into sexual pyrotechnic show. Not that the book isn't, at times, both of these things.

The narrative is broken into stories and is short and dense; the prose pared down so painfully hard it sometimes feels like it might fall apart. This is a book about compulsion. About a sometimes destructive, sometimes confusing, sometimes uplifting sexual compulsion, which is mirrored in the compulsiveness of the writing. The prose feels obsessive - like it ought to be handwritten in tiny, perfectly neat letters: the first person present, the uncompromising minimalism, the interwoven timelines. The writing in this book burns with control. But this is the kind of control Elliott needs to perform such high-wire turns as holding the reader perfectly balanced while he tells a story of a girlfriend slapping the protagonist's face until he cries, and threads it through with another story about his abusive father.

Early on, there are several sadistic, sexually dominant women in this book. They do not get an easy ride. They are portrayed variously as lazy, stupid, unattractive, inappropriately aggressive and selfish. Part of the sexual kink is that the women the protagonist interacts with sexually with are abusive toward him, but this still feels relentless and uncomfortable - until, toward the end of the book, the character of Eden becomes part of the story. Dominant and sadistic but also real, with her own voice in the narrative, Eden saves the protagonist's soul; she also saves the book itself. She transforms it from being another work of male-authored beautifully written, beautifully controlled literature, where every female character is defined only by her relationship with the protagonist's sexuality, into a love story. And in the final chapter - practically a eulogy to Eden - we even receive a romantic happy ever after.

While the book ends in an uplifting mood, that note doesn't feel overdone or false. Some books about kinky sex are so teeth-achingly positive that they sometimes read like the whole thing is just one all-done-with-mirrors glorious festival of "Spank me, naughty Zute!," where everything is consensual and no one is ever suffering any real damage. Other books portray the world of fetish sex as nothing but darkness, snuff movies and serial killers. Again, this book walks a careful line. Sometimes the sex is abusive, but there is always a level of consent, even if it is just the tacit consent given by not turning around and walking away. And where the sex is sometimes cathartic, it is not a healing end in itself.

Questions about healing, abuse, and consent start to pile up and wait for answers. What answers could there be? In the end they come in the sense that the protagonist begins to own the pain that drives him - that deriving sexual pleasure from the demons in his past is one way to avoid being consumed by them.

My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is a sexually explicit book with no explicit sex in it, a story of an abusive childhood with no mawkishness, and a memoir that claims to be fiction. It is compelling, compulsive, and disturbing, and a lot more truthful than most of the non-fiction it occasionally purports not to be.

To buy a copy of this book, click here.

Other interesting, unusual, considered books about darker themes in sex and sexuality include:

Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill

Crash: A Novel, by J. G. Ballard

Macho Sluts, by Pat Califia

Try, by Dennis Cooper

Asking for Trouble, by Kristina Lloyd

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabakov

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© Mathilde Madden

Mathilde Madden is an author, a journalist, and a lover of genre fiction. Her latest novel is Equal Opportunities, from Black Lace/Virgin Books. To read more of her work on-line, visit www.mathildemadden.co.uk, or read her past contributions to Reflection's Edge here.