That Time I Interviewed a Former Dominatrix

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Here’s a video from the vault, a recording of a conversation I had for the podcast with Melissa Febos about her memoir, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life.

About the (very fine) book:

While a college student at The New School, Melissa Febos spent four years working as a dominatrix in a midtown dungeon. In poetic, nuanced prose she charts in Whip Smart how unchecked risk-taking eventually gave way to a course of self-destruction. But as she recounts crossing over the very boundaries that she set for her own safety, she never plays the victim. In fact, the glory of this memoir is Melissa's ability to illuminate the strange and powerful truths that she learned as she found her way out of a hell of her own making. Rest assured; the reader will emerge from the journey more or less unscathed.

Melissa is the author of a number of other books and is presently a professor at the University of Iowa.

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