After graduating from Stanford in and publishing her first novel, Oola , in , writer Brittany Newell was looking for a job that would provide a decent income, while still allowing her time to write. She waited tables and tended bar, but found both mentally and physically exhausting.
Then she took a job as a professional dominatrix. It's much more about role play and the creation of these fantasy worlds and satisfying different fetishes.
And of course, the defining quality would be the power dynamic. Being a dominatrix provided Newell with the control of her time and creative freedom she was craving. But she says there was more to it than that; she also genuinely enjoyed the work.
Newell leaned on her work as a "dom" while writing her latest novel, Soft Core , which takes readers into San Francisco's underworld of dive bars, strip clubs and BDSM dungeons.
The novel's protagonist, Ruth, is a stripper who begins working as a professional dominatrix after her ex-boyfriend disappears. While many readers have assumed that Soft Core is autobiographical, Newell says it's a mix of fiction and "sensory details" pulled from her own life and the lives of people she's close to: "I always say [that's] the tax of dating or loving or befriending a writer. Is that all of these sort of like very specific, intimate, sometimes seemingly insignificant details are the things that end up being woven into the book and making it have the texture of real life.
