About book Nine And A Half Weeks: A Memoir Of A Love Affair (2005)
A potent antidote to the straightforward romances I’ve been reading lately. What is this madness! I vow that from now on I’ll intersperse my junk food with layered, intense, thought-provoking lit from authors that are comfortable enough to leave interpreting their story to their readers.I immersed myself in Nine and a Half Weeks with the same reckless abandon the narrator threw herself in a brief but all-consuming affair thirty years earlier. A word of caution first: both Francine Prose and the publisher apparently have no notion of what a foreword entails. You’re not supposed to grossly spoiler the upcoming story for your unsuspecting reader in your, although excellent, musings. Shameful.With her sisters’ hard-won battle for equality fresh in mind, "Elizabeth" (a pseudonym for Ingeborg Day, whose real identity wasn’t disclosed until much later) published this brutally honest memoir of her sadomasochistic affair with an unnamed man. A heady experience at first, cathartic even, before becoming increasingly intense and destructive. It must have been a slap in the face for some to read a woman describe "the nighttime rules decreed that I was helpless, dependent, totally taken care of. No decisions were expected of me, I had no responsibilities. I had no choice. I loved it. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it". An avalanche of BDSM romances hadn’t yet flooded the market at the time. FSOG didn’t exist yet (those were the days!). And although I suppose you can sense the echoes of Anais Nin’s work (and I now wonder if Annie Ernaux' Simple Passion was inspired by this, she uses similar style elements, though her story is tame and, dare I say, bland in comparison), never before had a successful middle-class, but above all, a woman written so frankly about sexual obsession. She caused a sensation.There are, of course, multiple ways to perceive Nine and a Half Weeks. You can choose to think of this as a plain and simple story of abuse, a school example of violence against women even. You can write off her partner in obsession as a perverted fuck, or her as a troubled lady with a, no doubt, murky childhood. Personally, I like to view their affair as a disturbingly fascinating once in your lifetime experience. The author wasn’t one of those people who stare longingly at their temptations from afar and, when offered a chance at adventure, shy away from the heat and live to regret it. To hell with it!, this woman thought. She danced, leaped, right into that all-consuming fire. And the outside world ceased to be. "The reality of my days was replaced by surface equanimity and a blandness to the core. My lunches bland, going past me unnoticed, mingling bland and friendly talk with bland and friendly people (…) The nights were palpable and fierce, razors, outlined so clearly as to be luminous. A different country, its landscape and currency plain: heat, fear, cold, pleasure, hunger, glut, pain, desire, overwhelming lust."Beautiful.I think it’s important to take the backdrop against which Nine and a Half Weeks was written into account. That being said, Elizabeth’s memoir has lost none of its intensity over the years. I adored the author’s ability to reveal and confess without unpeeling all the layers of the story. Her time spent with him, forever a mystery, she describes in elegant, at times poetic, prose that manages to be both tantalizing and detached. More than anything, I loved how she offers no explanations, no excuses for what transpired. She must have heard the judging voices of her future readers in her head, yet she refuses to acknowledge them or be self-conscious about her memories, instead delivering her Nine and a Half Weeks in 120 pages that are devoid of justifications. Forgive me for rambling on about this! This story made me realize how often writers spell out how you are supposed to perceive their work, leaving little to the imagination. I’m tired of being manipulated into reaching the conclusions authors want me to reach. Ingeborg Day committed suicide in 2011 after having been ill for several years. Her main motivation for publishing Nine and Half Weeks under the pseudonym Elizabeth McNeill was not the content of her memoir, but the fact that she had a young daughter. She didn’t want to drag her with her into the expected ensuing controversy and excitement. I have questions, yes! I’d love to be able to discuss these things with other readers. If only more than two of my friends had read this book!:p No matter how shiny, do not click the spoiler if you haven’t read the book yet.Warning: confused 2 AM ramblings.(view spoiler)[The occasions on which they clashed, and he packed her suitcase and, cool as a cucumber, called her a cab: I still wonder if I should interpret those scenes as blatant threats to manipulate her into getting back into the rollercoaster with him? Or could it be that he was simply genuine in his approach? Perhaps because he knew exactly what it was he wanted from her in their affair, he accepted that she wouldn’t give him her all and simply moved on towards the consequences? A third explanation; he may simply have realized that, considering their master/slave dynamics, she needed that push to comply, and he gave it to her.And what about the drag king scene? I don't think I fully grasped his purpose. He undeniably went through all this trouble to find her the perfect disguise, and of course he's pushing her boundaries, she's embarrassed, yet thrilled about passing as a man. Then he says; "It's all inside you, you know. Nobody else ever cares. But it does make it a lot of fun for me that you do." Is he referring to exciting her, offering her new experiences, did he hope to humiliate her, does he just want to get his gay on for a night?I wonder about him! I’m so very intrigued! Do you think this man was experienced in what he did? He appeared to be perfectly in control for a long time, but all we ever learn about him is colored by her infatuated take on him. Perhaps he was, although impressively inventive, insecure in his own right, something he carefully hid from her? He’s only human after all.Could she have been the first woman who took the plunge with him entirely, a situation that proved to be so intoxicating for them both that he, too, became a victim of their obsession? It seems too black and white to perceive her as the victim, the courageous woman who escaped! Rather I’m inclined to think that, although he was the initiator, he too got sucked in a downward spiral of bittersweet self-destruction and found it impossible to jump off the freight train.Or... could it be that he was entirely happy with how things were going and ultimately disappointed in her? Since they never truly talked about their expectations and boundaries, drunk on each other as they were, there was no way of knowing how invested she was into this thing they had. Especially the way he treats her mental break-down at the end seems evidence that he was uncertain and unable to deal (when having displayed being a tender caretaker during her previous illness) with this sudden development; it hit him by surprise that she wasn’t on board anymore. Did she miss him in the years to come? (hide spoiler)]
I first read "Nine and a Half Weeks" long ago--- long before the film with Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke. I was a brand-new undergraduate, and the first part of the book was excerpted in Playboy. I sat in my rooms at university stunned and amazed. I'd already read "Story of O"; I knew that s/m existed and knew about its allure. This was...different. It was darker than "O.", far more obsessive and intense, far less distanced and measured. I knew I had to go out and get a copy of the full book.All these years later, I still know nothing about the author, or about how seriously we're to take the claim that this is a memoir. But I do know that as soon as I read the first line--- "The first time we were in bed together he held my hands pinned down above my head. I liked it." ---that I was entranced. The prose is spare, crisp, hard. The mood is of course one of deepening obsession. In some ways it's about a self-destructive affair that engulfs both McNeill and her nameless lover, but in other ways...it's deeply, shatteringly romantic and enticing.Yes, I know--- the film. Easy enough to laugh at these days, though John Taylor's song on the soundtrack is excellent, and the young Kim Basinger was seriously hot when stripdancing to Randy Newman. The film takes away from the book, from the darkness and obsessiveness. But there was a time in the mid-'80s when every girl I knew was left wet-and-breathless by some of the scenes. I love moments in the book--- McNeill going through her lover's closet, analysing him from his clothes; the first time her lover slaps her during sex; McNeill dressing up as a boy for her lover and mugging a stranger at knifepoint to prove her own abandon and courage. There's a moment where her lover takes her to an English riding shop and shocks the saleswoman by trying out a riding crop on McNeill's bare thigh (right--- like that would ever be unusual in a high-end riding gear shop in NYC!) that's just...incredible. Let's just say that the riding crop scene prompted phone calls from girls and feverish checking out the Yellow Pages under "equestrian"... And that the scene where McNeill dresses up as a boy for her lover (suit and fedora) prompted trips to Goodwill with leggy co-eds. Yes, then: let's just say that the book is incredibly hot. Let's make a note of that.The book itself is originally from 1978. A different world now. For all that we're so "open" about sex, for all the mainstreaming of s/m imagery, we'd be far less able to see a book like this published now. This is a DSM-IV world, a gender studies world. Obsession and compulsion have been stripped of any glamour, even dark glamour. That a successful, thirty-ish professional might lose herself in an affair like this would now be something for therapists to moralise over and for feminists to become angry about. Oh, I can hear all the arguments about consent and "self-respect" and violence and "subjectivity". I can hear all of that. I can hear the voices saying that McNeill needed help, that she'd obviously suffered from some childhood trauma and been brought up in a society where "rape culture" is normal, yadda yadda yadda. But let's also say that this is one of the Hot Reads I've kept with me in different editions all through the years. It's a fine read, and romantic in more ways than I can say. Go find it. Read it. Yes--- it's about as hot (coldly intellectually hot as well as pure-raw-sex hot) as it gets...
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Sinceramente nem vou dar uma classificação a este livro. Porque não consigo, porque é demasiado perturbador, tão perturbador que ainda agora acabei de o ler e sinto que tenho de o expurgar de alguma forma da minha mente.Quem nunca ouviu falar do filme Nove Semanas e meia? Bem, suponho que muita gente, mas tendo crescido nos anos 90 ouvi falar dele se bem que nunca o cheguei a ver. No entanto conheço-o como um filme erótico de alguma notoriedade. Por isso, quando vi esta nova edição na livraria e
—Patrícia
3.5 starsNot my usual stuff to read but I love the movie. I had no idea this was a book, much less that this was a memoir written in the 70's under a pen name.The book was very hard to put down. I was up until four in the morning reading this knowing I had to get up by seven. I definitely felt like I needed a cold shower after this one. It was hard not picture (the young) Mickey Rourke and myself as I read this. But somewhere down the line, this relationship started to feel a little uncomfortable. The author was losing complete control of herself and the choices she made. It was sexy to a point, but when this man requires you to be handcuffed every night to the table, to the bedpost, to the sink...when is it overkill? He starts requiring her to steal something from a store but when he scoffs her for the wimpy way she stole the item he pushes her to assault and rob someone in an elevator. I would imagine a relationship like this would get boring real soon and the players would have to up the ante every time. This is what ends up happening. The stakes start getting higher, the demands more humiliating. What more can this relationship be based on after that? The book was written in a very detached way that added to the tension felt throughout the book. I thought it was the perfect style for this story. The reader is like a spectator, not there to make judgement, but to question themselves how far they would let this relationship go if they were in the author's place.
—Licha
I'm glad I chose to read Francine Prose's "Introduction" after I finished the book. It has spoilers, and should really be an afterword.Nine and a Half Weeks, as a movie, is one that always turns up as a sort of classic "trashy 80s erotic romance." The movie and its characters are breezy, pumped along by the vaguely pop-jazz rhythms that signal good times or transitions in such films. I watched it while in the mood for something light/less intellectual. It wasn't until I watched the movie that I knew it was at least roughly based on a book of the same title.I read the book because movies like that make me wonder what really happened in those pages that the film-makers were either unable or unwilling to portray. While a few of the events are accurately rendered in the movie, the movie makes excuses for the characters' actions, and the book does not. The characters and their psychology are absolutely not the same.Some readers see this as a "dark" book, and at moments it is, but it's also suffused with a joyfully wicked, manic, brightly burning passion which contrasts its deadpan prose. It is a book of contrasts.
—Cathy
