In the wake of Shades of Grey, publishers have been madly casting about for new sex-centric lit to publish in order to cash in on the sudden mainstream interest in erotica. One recent release is Diary of a Submissive, by Sophie Morgan. Cast as a memoir of a “real-life submissive,” Diary of a Submissive feels more authentic than Shades, which read like the freshman creative writing class efforts of a girl who walked into a bondage store for the first time and decided to build a story around it.

While Diary of a Submissive is fairly vanilla, there’s no denying that it’s better-written than Shades of Grey, with a more careful eye toward characterization. There is no character without motivation and here, the narrator’s motivations are dealt with in depth. Morgan discovered her penchant for submission in college. In this book, she looks back on a number of relationships with male dominants, including her romance with James, described coyly by the publisher as “a real-life Christan Grey.” Part of the point of the book is that Sophie, a journalist who is fairly well-adjusted and has a good family, falls into a pattern of seeking pain in order to feel pleasure–a pattern seemingly at odds with her feminist bent and her confidence. Of course, we know that a person can embrace many contradictions; most of us do. Ultimately, Morgan’s sexual journey doesn’t feel terribly unique or even all that dangerous. I think this book would have been shocking in 1961. Today, not so much.

What happens when a topic is popularized is that it is homogenized. This isn’t a book that’s going to teach you anything you didn’t already know about sex. It’s not terribly likely to shock you. There are some interesting passages, and some situations that, paragraph-by-paragraph, hold the promise of some great resolution. By the end of the book, I did feel some empathy for Sophie, but the sense of a had-earned resolution was missing. In real life, there isn’t always an epiphany, and maybe that’s the point, but in terms of a narrative arc, this book left me feeling unsatisfied. That said, it is cast as a “diary,” which implies a day-to-day accounting of events as opposed to a memoir of novelistic depth and proportion.

For a real education on BDSM, read Stephen Elliott’s erudite and fascinating My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, or better yet, visit Mr. S. in San Francisco. Or just visit San Francisco and look for the nearest sex club. They’re not that hard to find.

Read a review of Real-Life Erotica: Diary of a Submissive. Or join the discussion here.

Note: This is a paid review for Blogher Book Club, but the views expressed are entirely my own.