Thursday, February 9, 2006

Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Anonymous

I’ve been busy, busy, busy, but had no problem finishing this one. This is one I’ve wanted to read for awhile now. Another friend of ours told us all about it and it sounded good in a dirty sort of way. Not to mention, there was a hilarious story of a campaign by her sister to hide this book from her mother and then lie about it. An intro like that can not be ignored. Also, I couldn’t seem to find it in any bookstores so the lack of availability lead to even more want... sort of like that economic supply and demand thing.

Belle is a university educated and unemployed and living in London. Imagine Bridget Jones if she didn’t have that job at the book publishing house and instead decided to work as a high priced prostitute. They both write in the journal format and they both have caring parents. Both are looking for love. We should end the comparisons here. Unlike Bridget, Belle does not try looking for love from the workplace. She has a boyfriend and he knows about her profession and seems okay with it.

She is broke and job prospects are scarce. She contacts an agency to handle the business side of things. Yes, this is where the voice of reason should come in. This isn’t a very good career choice for anyone as I’m pretty sure my guidance counselor didn’t have that pamphlet in her collection of possible futures. But I opted to ignore that voice of reason and just treat this as an interesting character study. She is not in this line of work to support a drug habit, did not have a horrible childhood, and nor is she trying to live with a horrific trauma in her past. She is just a working girl who soon finds out that she can get paid a lot more for one night with a client than most of her other jobs combined.

Most of the entries are about her personal life and her friends. I was really hoping for more on the call girl side of things. There was a lot of that too but those were the parts I looked forward to the most. Not ‘cause I was looking for porn as everyone knows that the good porn is on the internet. And to be honest, I’ve read more explicit stuff elsewhere, just not often in chicklit book form. My favorite client story was the one where she talks about the guys who just want to cuddle. Or about the practical side of the job like how she would buy the regular products at one drug store and then buy all the “job” products (like condoms, lube, etc.) at another.

This was a definitely an interesting book and should be read by everyone who doesn’t have a problem with those type of things. Just fun.

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