Belle de Jour

May 8, 2006
In this entertaining memoir, a 28-year-old British university grad gravitates to London to find a proper job, gets discouraged by temp office work and turns to the lucrative world of the sex trade, where she is asked how she does on her A-levels—not university requirements, but "anals." Anonymous is frank and enterprising, and eager to dish the details of her life as a call girl for an elite London agency that charges £300 per hour—"more than 30 times what I would have made doing anything else," she notes briskly. She's had a little experience as a dominatrix and isn't averse to having sex with women; she's open, definitely, to certain procedures such as fisting, rimming and OWO, or Oral Without (a condom). What sets this chronicle apart from being a numbing operations manual is the author's saucy, ironic tone (she loves her Jewish family), her evident intelligence (she studied French and catches clients' literary allusions) and well-placed friends she describes with hilarious precision. With her "straitlaced as a whalebone corset" boyfriend, she actually hopes for true love, and even reveals to him her profession—which she details on her Web site that the Guardian
awarded in 2003 "Best Written British Blog."