Diary of a Submissive

Diary of a Submissive: A Modern True Tale of Sexual Awakening, by Sophie Morgan.

His grip is solicitous as he helps me to my feet. We walk past you, arm in arm. He smiles. Nods. You half nod back before you catch yourself and wonder what on earth you're doing. I am looking studiously at the ground, my head down.

You can see I am shaking. But what you can't see his how aroused this whole experience has made me. How hard my nipples are in the confines of my bra. How my trembling is as much from the adrenaline high of everything that has just played out in front of you as it is from the cold and humiliation. How I thrive on this. How it completes me in a way that I can't fully explain. How I hate it yet love it. Yearn for it. Crave it.

You can't see any of that. All you can see is a trembling woman with dirty knees, walking away on wobbly legs.

This is my story.

The tagline for this novel is "Everyone's waiting for the real life Fifty Shades of Grey ... Sophie Morgan's tantalizing tale does not disappoint." Sophie Morgan's name is also a pseudonym, for reasons that will become obvious from the very beginning of the book. I have read the Fifty Shades series, and if those were considered R-rated, this novel would be NC-17 ... let's just say that when I was reading it in public, I may have tilted the cover down just a little, so people couldn't see what I was reading!

I read this for the BlogHer Book Club, too, which was rather interesting, since it walks a fine line between porn and an autobiography. It's more like a well-written 50 Shades, which I definitely appreciated (since the writing in that series was AWFUL), but everything that happened in this novel was/is true, according to our narrator, though I noticed a lot of similarities to 50 in terms of situations. About the author:

Sophie Morgan is the pseudonym for a journalist in her early 30s. While working hard at a career she loves, she is surrounded by friends and amused and exasperated by her family in about equal measure. She loves animals and Marmite (the British food spread), hates people who stop abruptly when walking down the street so you walk into them, and spends too much money on books, DVDs, and handbags, mostly in that order. The one thing missing in her life is someone with whom to share it - someone who will dominate her sexually, as well as help sort out the recycling.

I almost wrote "this novel takes place in England" just now, because at times it felt like a novel - it was extremely detailed, but not "fictionally so" - no "sexy" adjectives added or whatnot - and it almost felt like fiction, even though I knew I was reading an autobiography. Sophie lives in England (hence the Marmite references) and has a hectic career as a journalist. In her free time, she likes to have crazy sex, though most of her "inner circle" doesn't know about the "submissive" side of her personality.

While she was at university, she met her first lover, Ryan, with whom she started a Dominant/submissive relationship with (capital "D," lower-case "s" is the proper grammar, as she explains in the book). After college, she has a few more "vanilla" relationships, and then she starts a D/s relationship with her best friend at the time, Thomas, experimenting with him and one of his friends, Catherine. The middle and end of the book details her tumultuous relationship with James, whom she meets when she interviews him for a story - very similar to how Ana and Christian meet in 50 Shades.

This book was interesting because it gives us an insight into Sophie's psyche; she knows that something's a little wrong with her for getting beaten up and liking it, as well as letting herself be ordered around, but at the same time it also gets her excited. She talks about her relationships with her family and friends, and how she first discovered she was in to D/s relations, or how the inkling was there during her childhood. I could have done without the almost-pornographic sex and D/s scene descriptions, but if they weren't there then this book would probably not have been as interesting, I will admit, and definitely wouldn't be compared to 50 Shades, though I'm not sure if the author was aiming for that or not.

3.5 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I was compensated for writing this review for the BlogHer Book Club. The opinions expressed here, however, are my own.