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My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up
![My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up]()
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Manufacturer: Cleis Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Kindle Edition
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
Format: Kindle Book
Label: Cleis Press
Manufacturer: Cleis Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 168
Publication Date: 2006-10-02
Publisher: Cleis Press
Studio: Cleis Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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This blistering new collection from literary rising star Stephen Elliott demonstrates once again why his books have been praised as “graceful,” “soaring,” and “fearless.” As with all of Elliott’s work, these stories have the raw ring of truth filtered through the author’s downbeat-poetic sensibility. My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up follows the narrator on a dizzying ride through past and present, from a group home for troubled adolescents in Chicago where he loses his virginity to shooting galleries and homeless encampments in San Francisco where he searches for deeper and darker thrills. In “Other Desires,” a flood of unsettling memories backgrounds the narrator’s involvement with a loose-knit family of lost souls. “Tears” explores the disturbing complexities of an S/M Internet hook-up. Several of the stories feature the enigmatic Eden, the narrator’s polyamorous mistress. With My Girlfriend, Elliott confirms his status as a major young writer of a kind of literary fiction that recalls the work of Genet and Bukowski.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: True or Not, These Stories Are Kinky, Intense, and Utterly Memorable
Comment: The real question in Stephen Elliott's short story collection My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is not whether these tales are autobiographical or not (though Elliott admits that many are true, or mostly true, in his introduction), but whether Elliott, as narrator, consents to, and likes or does not like, the kinky acts described herein. In powerful, waste-no-words prose, Elliott takes readers on a guided tour through the underbelly of San Francisco and into his narrator's sex life, mental state, and troubled childhood. The city of the book's title plays a major role in these stories, but Elliott is clear to distinguish his version of BDSM from the "safe, sane and consensual" model best embodied by the City by the Bay's kinksters. This distinction is explicitly stated several times throughout My Girlfriend Comes... and the power dynamics behind his interest in kink are what make this an emotionally compelling, disturbing and vital read. Each tenet of "safe, sane and consensual" is revisited again and again until it's anyone's guess which side the stories fall on.
During the scenes Elliott describes, he often asks questions for which there is no answer. In the title story, his girlfriend comes to visit and duly beats him up, but it;s her words that leave the harshest blows. When she says "I'm not your mother reincarnate," his immediate reaction is: "And I'm thinking why would she say that? Who would say such a god-awful thing," then later, "I didn't check the box that says 24/7. I didn't sign up for this kind of lifestyle. I didn't want this. But I don't know what I want, I never have. And she's always been honest with me, and I've done nothing but lie to her. Then I'm crying more, and soon I can't stop crying." He pushes himself into unfamiliar situations, constantly questioning them and what he wants from these scenes. Through outthe book, it's clear that BDSM is both a physical act and a pathway to some emotional salve. He looks to strong, dominant women to steer him toward where he should go. In the opening story, "First Things First," set in Amsterdam, he writes, "She didn't ask what I liked, which was good because I had no idea what I liked or what I was into or what I wanted to do or wanted done to me." This theme reappears even as he gains knowledge about why he craves submission and what he prefers, much of which involves offering himself to women to take, test, and hurt him.
Elliott throws traditional erotica to the wind and complicates matters, mixing emotional pain and physical pleasure, and vice versa, until it's often unclear where one ends and the other begins. He doesn't seek to separate sex and kink from Real Life, so in the middle of a story about wearing a gas mask, he jumbles together his suffocation wth what's happening beyond their limited play space: "We don't know that her husband has been leaving messages on my phone. Her mother is OK. Her mother doesn't have cancer. It's just scar tissue. The phone is turned off. I can't breathe and I'm shaking my head, no no no no." The words rush at the page until finally she praises him with "Good boy," and for the narrator, "It's the only thing in the world worth hearing." It's these absolute statements of pure, raw need, the kind that we so often cover up but here Elliott thrusts forward, as if opening a Band-aid to reveal red, tender skin, an act he's compelled to do again and again, that make this slim volume a keeper. In the same story, he moves seamlessly from his lover, Eden, hitting him so hard that "[t]he animal I sound like doesn't exist yet" to being hit by his father, the two permanently entwined, one consensual, one not. It's this admissionthat there is no unraveling his abusive childhood from his chosen masochismthat is both startling, brave, and often uncomfortable (in the best way possible) to read.
In his introduction, Elliott writes of the political necessity for sharing our sexuality, especially of the BDSM variety, with the world: "It is in everyone's best interest for more people to be open about their sexual desires." While I happen to agree with him on that score, these interconnected stories lack the over-the-top blaring messages of propaganda, and offer a different motive: to make sense of, and simply declare, that he exists, that he is not succumbing to any forces other than his own will. Even as he writhes in pain, he points out that it's pain he wants, and will struggle and fight for.
Elliott's writing is straightforward and direct, but no less powerful for its simplicity. The themes repeated throughout the stories, of searching, connection, disappointment, desire, and love, echo strongly by the end. He doesn't apologize for the desires that drive his protagonist, even when they get him in over his head. Perhaps the political message here is that even if what we want and need sexually is not truly safe, sane or consensual, it's our right to pursue it, to pursue pain that may not necessarily bring clarity, pleasure, or wisdom, that may in fact simply invite more pain; in Elliott's world, that pain is a prism through which to see himself anew. These stories will likely make you flinch, recoil, and marvel not just as Elliott's ability to transform his past into an aggressively kinky present, but also his remarkably simple yet ruthlessly honest way of bringing sex onto the page, not as simple titillation or sensationalism, but as part and parcel of the drama, pain, and work of life itself. By pushing readers, and himself, into the darkest places he can go, he shines light on the often-hidden lives of submissive men and forces us to confront all the ugliness and beauty contained therein.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: I Expected A Lot Based On What I'd Heard But This Book Did Not Fulfill Expectations
Comment: Yep, I'd heard a lot about Stephen Elliot's My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up, and virtually all of it was so glowingly positive I bought it without a second thought. So now I've read it, and what do I think?
Hmmm.
First off, great title! Truly great. Secondly, alas, it's also a bad book on which to hang that great title. In fact, although I know I'll take heat for saying this--boy oh boy I just know I will---this collection of pseudo-autobiographical short stories about the author's self-congratulatorily deviant sex life is barely readable. The stories here are unevenly laid out, way too egocentric, and they rapidly become tiring with their progression of one set of buttocks after another beaten in pursuit of erotic gratification. In fact I'll wager that if you were awestruck by these stories, then odds are you're probably under twenty-five and haven't been exposed to a lot of truly good writing in this particular field.
Page thirty-one: "She wanted to hit me across the back with a chain. But still, even as I'm missing her, and knowing that I will see her again, the question stays with me. The idea of two people finding each other. A person who wants to be hurt and another who wants to hurt someone. We've never had sex. We won't have sex. I've never seen her naked. I just don't understand where it comes from that someone could say such a thing."
Now imagine a couple hundred pages of this sort of prose and subject material and you'll see why I didn't think this short story collection was all it was hyped to be. I mean, come on, couldn't you write better than that? Couldn't most English majors you know?
Yeah, I know, it's rude to rip up on someone's memoir-esque prose but it's also annoyingly apparent to me that Elliot deliberately tried too hard to be shocking (don't try to tell me he didn't) and completely failed to be, and there's no excuse for the sort of intentional heavy-handedness he put out there. Also the author's much-expressed father issues bleed through so often they simply sound whiny. Honestly, just because a book deals with a subject outside the mainstream, stands to joyfully offend some uptight people, uses a lot of profanity, and has a slightly artsy, albeit pretentious, attempt at an edge, that doesn't necessarily mean it's any good.
Before anyone starts in with the "you didn't get it/you must be repressed" rebuttals, let me say I don't condemn any sexual viewpoint this side of child molestation, and judging by the wide ranging books I read, books on just about every conceivable subject, fiction non-fiction, you name it, I think I can humbly suggest I am open-minded enough to grasp diverging points of view. That said, I couldn't see anything redeeming here. It's a lot of anachronistic retro-Gen-X-style complaining of the "poor me, I am so misunderstood and life my is hard" stripe, with graphic, badly-penned S&M montages tossed in. And while on that subject, what makes Stephen Elliot truly think anyone wants to read second-by-second accounts of his (apparently thinly fictionalized) forays into bondage, discipline, abject physical humiliation, prostitution, and the repeated insertion of foreign objects into his body cavities? Like literary junk food, enough was soon enough.
There was no art here in this book, scant talent, and the whole mess read like middling first-year creative writing "I'm gonna try and shock you" fare. Save yourself a waste of time and money and go read something else. Odds are whatever it is, it's going to be better than this.
Sigh. Okay, I've laid it on thick, so I'm ready, let the negative comments flow...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another great book from Stephen Elliott
Comment: Stephen Elliott has written another intelligent, enjoyable book. He writes about unusual, sometimes uncomfortable, subjects with style and grace.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a true path
Comment: I love this book. It traces part of the author's growth from an abusive childhood to a happier adulthood. He allows us to see how his painful upbringing was reflected in series of painful and unhappy periods of sexual experimentation. The earlier chapters can be depressing, but hang on, because there is a trajectory toward a better present. I love this book for its honesty and authenticity. The last chapter is especially beautiful because it rings with a truth I have also seen: that bdsm can be healing. It makes sense that some people find bdsm within themselves not as something that needs to be cured but as a means of coping with and possibly resolving old wounds. Some of those experiences may be inaccessible to recall. The "healing" is counterintuitive and cathartic. In this context, bdsm can extend beyond bedroom kinks and thrills into the territory of personal growth and redemption. Mr. Elliott paints a spare and elegant portrait of such a process taken from his own life. Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up
Comment: Stephen Elliot's My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is a collection of ten highly autobiographical stories, mostly set in the S&M scene in San Francisco. Elliott writes in a compressed, minimalistic style that is simultaneously aggressive and inviting (not to mention erotic and thought-provoking), all the while weaving his stories into a loose narrative thread which moves from his earliest and most dangerously confused encounters through a decade of singles websites, dominating housewives, and relationships that often satisfy only temporarily if at all. The title story is one of the strongest in the collection, describing an afternoon spent with a girlfriend he met on an online dating service. As the girlfriend slaps him and blackens his eyes, she's forced to generate her anger by berating him over things that never happened, eventually saddening Elliot instead of turning him on:
"She was straddling me in her blue jeans when she said, "I'm not your father." She was still angry about something I had suggested, or that I had hurried her out of the bar and she hadn't finished her drink. It was all made up. A game. But I started to feel sad when she mentioned my father. I have such an awful relationship with my father. Aren't you supposed to forgive and forget stuff? I was thirteen when I left home. It's been seventeen years since he caught me and beat me and shaved my head and the state took custody and I became a ward of the court. We try to mend things but I get these letters from him and it's just too much. He thinks he's the victim. Like I have victimized him by making him out to be such a horrible father. But he was a horrible father and I spent a year, a full year, sleeping on rooftops and in hallways and eating out of garbage cans and all he remembers are the times I came home to shower, proof that I didn't have it so bad. I was only thirteen, then fourteen..."
Many of Elliott's stories revolve around this same basic relationship: a man and a woman who don't have sex (at least in the traditional sense) but instead reenact cycles of hurting and being hurt, or as Elliott puts it, "The idea of two people finding each other. A person who wants to be hurt and another who wants to hurt someone." At the same time, there is a progression throughout the book as he moves from the random dangers of his early, uninformed experiences through the highly ritualistic S&M scene found online and finally to his healthiest relationships, which are still different from social norms but also contains elements of love and happiness not found in his earlier experiences.
There's a great sadness to many of these stories, but there's also a sexy swagger and a hopeful soul that stylishly carries the reader through those darkest moments. Equal parts erotica, memoir, and fiction, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is easily one of the finest collections I've read this year.
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