Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.

I think we all are born inside of our parents' narratives. We stay there for a good while. We are taught their narratives about everything: their marriage, the world, God, gender, identity, etcetera. Then, at some point, our own narrative develops too much integrity to live inside that story. We don't ever fully escape it, but we move into our own stories.

When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I'd never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.

I absolutely think that women told that writing about themselves is somehow not worthy enough for a public audience all the time. I hear it so often from my students and friends. As if it doesn't take rigorous craft, and intellectual acuity to write a slammin' book of any kind. But perhaps, especially, about the body.

I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.

Early in my career as a domme, I both admired and feared becoming one of those career dommes. I saw, in myself, and in some other women in that industry, the way that sex work could eclipse the other parts of your personality, the way that I started to feel as if I wasn't qualified to do anything else. I had always known that I wanted to be a writer, and I stopped writing for a time while I was domming; the experience subsumed my other interests, and it scared me. Now, however, I have nothing but admiration for them.