‘Soft Core’ Is a Dominatrix Novel With a Gothic Twist

Ruth definitely experiences that with her clients: “On off days I was penetrated (by their bitterness, their grief, their BO).” Sex work talked about as being a vehicle for others. 

Totally. The central love story is Ruth and Dino, but it was also important for me to explore all these other deviant intimacies, if you will. We have the extremely profound but strange intimacies between Ruth and her clients at the dungeon, where it’s this intense way of knowing someone. This is so Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous of me, but: I remember going to a meeting and they said everyone is just trying to fill the God-shaped hole inside of them, which is an amazing way to think about yourself, but also about all characters, and also a way to think about johns, what motivates them to pursue these different forms of paid intimacy with beautiful girls who are—as we said—just ghosts, just projections. 

How much were you orchestrating each of the book’s three parts as a whole?

The first chapter was a short story that I ended up publishing in n+1. I was trying to work on some other potential novel at the time. My friend had read the short story and was asking me questions about Ruth and Dino’s relationship and their romance. She had such curiosity about it that I started cheating on the project that I was supposed to be working on, and  went back to what was, at the time, the short story—just extending it and deepening it. It was this kind of ecstatic gush. I would go to my little office that I was renting with my ex; he had a real-person suits job, 9-5, and I would cosplay as that, I would sit down and get so lost in it. There wasn’t much plotting in the initial draft. Early readers said that the book felt like it was edging them, because there was just no climax.

All I knew going in was that I wanted Ruth to end up working at the dungeon because I wanted a vehicle for my dungeon stories. Everything else was a surprise to me. While writing, it really did feel like a Choose Your Own Adventure. 

Had you been keeping a record of your own experiences with sex work as they were happening to you, or they were summoned during the ecstatic gush?

It was more the gush of remembering. Once I was remembering one story, then others would come up. My way of documenting all the stories, mainly, is just through telling my friends about them. That act of describing the dungeon in such specific detail—how it looked, the kitchen full of the moldy fruit—probably also jogged a lot of memories, because I do describe it to an almost non-fictional level: what it smelled like and what the rules were. If you worked at this now-defunct dungeon in the Bay Area, you would recognize it immediately.

Did you consider non-fiction as an avenue, or was fiction always the right decision? 

When I was around 25, I was trying to work on this book of nonfiction essays called My Body and Other Conspiracy Theories. Now, looking back on it, I’m like, “Oh yeah that was going nowhere”—but that was my first attempt to chronicle all of my thoughts and stories and ruminations on sex work, as well as chronic pain and spirituality. The failure of that project… I wonder if that’s what made writing Soft Core so ecstatic, because I had already tried non-fiction as a way to sketch out these ideas about desire and male loneliness that were really consuming me at the time. 

I want people to know that I’m coming from a place of experience, but—I know you’re not supposed to do this—I do sometimes look at Goodreads, and a few of the early reviews are calling it a memoir. And I’m like,“It’s not a memoir. I am not Ruth.” I think we all do this as readers, conflate the main character with the author; I’ve even found myself doing it when I’m reading. But, from a craft perspective, the fact that I’m not Ruth is what made writing Soft Core so much easier.

The craft of Soft Core is clear because of this liminal space you create for Ruth and her psychological slippage, those dizzily shifting states of mind.

You used the perfect word: slippage. This slippage between fantasy and reality defines not only sex work, but defines the experience of being in love, and the slippage between extremes: loving this person and then hating them and feeling protected by them and feeling incredibly crushed by them. Feeling like you know them, and feeling like you don’t. The book is structured specifically around the slippage between the flesh and the fantasy in all aspects of Ruth’s life, as she drifts around San Francisco and loses touch with what is actually happening. 

San Francisco’s contemporary image is so overshadowed by tech bros, but yours is such a different vision… What’s your experience of living there, and how is it an important part of the story? 

I get so frustrated and impatient with these very one-dimensional depictions of contemporary San Francisco, often by people who don’t live here or maybe lived here for a short period of time. Depicting it as this, like, vapid tech wasteland with no culture… I can think of a few books off the top of my head that do that. I’m not going to name them, but it always makes so fucking mad because, for me, San Francisco is such a romantic city. The physical beauty of San Francisco is so undeniable, and it does have this history of debauchery, this deeply enmeshed history of leather and kink and a place where people come to bottom out. 

It was clear to me that I would set the book in San Francisco and describe this city as I experience it, which is as this sort of shape-shifting, magical, sometimes really challenging and heart-wrenching place. I didn’t go into it with this idea, but another thing my agents mentioned was there’s almost elements of noir in the book, hearkening back to sleazy ’90s erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct. That was exciting to me, to weave in that atmospheric quality, San Francisco as another intimacy that Ruth has with the city itself. It’s another important relationship that—like any relationship—often hurts you, but then at other times wows you. 

On a much less poetic level, it would have felt flat for me to set the book anywhere else. A lot of contemporary novels are set in this sort of sitcom-esque, one-size-fits-all version of Brooklyn. Everything is just always set in New York, for some reason, because even if you don’t live there, you have enough of a sense of it to write about it. I have so much to say about San Francisco’s smells and its sounds, and my relationship to it—and also to fight, as you said, the knee-jerk depictions of San Francisco as this Blue Bottle coffee/North Face hell zone. It also has that, for sure, but that’s not all of it.

I wanted to ask you about loneliness—both in Ruth and in these men who solicit her. 

Something that I never stop writing about is longing and the different things that we use to fill it.

At the risk of oversimplifying all of the multitudinous reasons that people seek out sex workers or companions or escorts, a lot of the time, the cliché is true. I think if you ask any person who’s worked in the field of companionship, be it fetish or escorting or girlfriend experience or stripping, so much of it is about abetting male loneliness, which can feel really weird and intense. Witnessing these strange moments of vulnerability from people that you don’t know… A john is a stranger but is, at the same time, telling you things no one else in his life knows. You don’t know his first name, but you know his deepest, darkest secret. That dichotomy can take a pretty heavy psychic tax on a sex worker’s mind. A lot of friends often say that they feel like they’re underdressed therapists. Strip clubs are a really interesting expression of that loneliness, because there’s the social element of going with your friends, there’s the regulars who come every day and come alone, or come because they don’t want to go home. There’s all these different flavors of ways to lessen the loneliness.