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.
I think Ruth is lonely and it actually has made me reflect a lot on my writing in general. And I think I'm always writing about characters who are defined by their longing and motivated by trying to fill the God-shaped hole inside of them, to use step language. I think she has a lot of reservations about her own lovability and also her own desirability, which maybe is one of the many reasons why she enjoys her work as a stripper and later as a dominatrix.
I think she's a very curious person, which probably would be the main ways that I think I'm like Ruth. Like, I actually think I'm very different from Ruth, but we do share that fundamental curiosity and like an attraction to underworld's or shadows, maybe. I feel like she's very unafraid of things that other people might deem seedy or grubby.
