The Secret Life of a Submissive, by Sarah K
I’ve been part of the Scene for a little while now but this was the first time I’d sat down to read a full novel based on someone’s real life experiences. And it was delightful!
The story starts with an erotic writer who has never tried anything kinky, and slowly reveals her journey, step by step, into realising that maybe the things she writes about are things she could, you know, do.
So she sets out to explore, by finding a man to make her fantasies come true.
I loved the humour in it, the writer has a wonderful way with words, and the moments she describes are so familiar. The awkward-excited feeling of that first time at a play party. The people and their oh-so-human variety. The odd conversations and moments of surrealness. And the self discovery possible.
I have met the people she describes. Not the actual individuals, but people that fit those descriptions perfectly. This gave me a lovely feeling of familiarity, and both nostalgia for those first few forays I took, and fondness for the new sub describing her initiation into a new world.
It struck me that the most popular fantasies, and even this story, seem to highlight wealthy Dominant types who can afford to drop money on a plane ticket and a fancy hotel, and that’s certainly not the most common scenario that I’ve seen. Many of us budget carefully for our kinks… but stressing about money doesn’t make for a pleasant fantasy so it makes a certain amount of sense (even though I suspect it has as much to do with the conflation of money with power with Dominance as with minimising stress). It also is firmly within a particular perspective, a particular kind of dynamic, so needs to be read as one story, not something that reveals the whole kink Scene.
It was a very sweet, humorous, account of one woman’s introduction to the kink world, and I really enjoyed Sarah’s reflections on the BDSM world as she explored the spaces that opened for her, and I’ll admit to wondering if we’ll ever hear what Sarah did next…
Book Club Time! Have you read The Secret Submissive by Sarah K? What did you think? What’s your favourite true kinky story?
Twisted Ms Quin 