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THE NOT-SO-SECRET DIARIES OF A DOMINATRIX

Many things come easy in life to smart, beautiful women. Melissa Febos, the author of "Whip Smart", understands this. It is what allows her to nail job interviews and collect boyfriends with ease. But Febos also has gifts as a writer, including a knack for self-deflation. "Whip Smart" is a memoir about the author's four-year career as a dominatrix in a dungeon in midtown Manhattan. "An hour alone with a naked man with whom you do not intend to have sex can be a very long time," she recalls thinking on the day of her first session. Already we like her.

Now a writing instructor at SUNY Purchase College and the Gotham Writers' Workshop, Febos begins her story with her search for a job that pays better than her gigs in publishing. She was then a recent graduate of the New School university in New York, with a minor heroin habit, an inborn curiosity and a petite and curvy figure. Her neighbour, whose apartment bears such signs of sophistication as an Egon Schiele print and air-conditioning, is a dominatrix who seems to enjoy her job. The two women talk: trade secrets are shared, seeds are sown.

Febos locates the Dungeon of Mistress X through an ad in the back of the Village Voice. The place is nicer than she had expected, a sprawl of spotless dungeons outfitted with hanging cages, riding crops, paddles and coffins. Coffins? "For clients into sensory deprivation," explains Febos's superior during the tour. Ah, yes. She is hired, and her asking price will be $75 for an hour-long session, plus tips. Work starts the following Monday.

Memoirs about salacious adventures have two requirements: they must be generous with the goods and astute with the analysis. Febos delivers on both, and with relish. No salty detail escapes her eye or goes unexamined. "Everything about him, from his hunched back to the quaver in his voice, was a demand phrased as a question," she writes of one client. Her fellow mistresses have "a fluidity of body that is particular to those accustomed to being perceived sexually." And the job itself, she discovers, is in some ways an exaggeration of the role she's been struggling with since puberty: that of a woman whose "power lay in her inherent feminine sexuality, in her coos and cleavage, not in her hands or head." Despite the pageantry of her supposedly dominating role, Febos perceives something insidious in this performance. As she once said in an interview with Marie Claire: "I wasn't really in control. It was my job to humiliate these men, but they were getting off on it, and I actually ended up feeling humiliated myself."

Sex work is a common subject for fantasies both personal and televisual (see Showtime's "Secret Diary of a Call Girl"), but its realities tend to be depressing. "Whip Smart" falls into neither category. Febos is too self-aware to not see her past clearly, and too talented a writer to not make it fascinating.

"Whip Smart" by Melissa Febos is out now in America (Thomas Dunne Books); it will be published in Britain on April 1st (Saint Martin's Press)

~ MOLLY YOUNG