Working Out the Kinks

Brittany Menjivar interviews Brittany Newell about style, symbolism, and representations of sex work in her second novel, “Soft Core.”

By Brittany MenjivarMarch 27, 2025

• Fiction

• Gender & Sexuality

WHENEVER I COME ACROSS another Brittany, I feel an instant sense of kinship. So you can bet that when I met Brittany Newell—not only a fellow Brittany but also a fellow author—I immediately requested an advance copy of her sophomore novel, Soft Core (published last month by FSG). It turned out to be incredibly fitting that the coincidence of our shared name should bring us together: names and coincidence are both major themes in the enthralling follow-up to her Lolita-esque debut Oola (2017).

Soft Core’s protagonist, Ruth, is a former grad student turned stripper still living with her drug-dealer ex-boyfriend Dino. When Dino goes missing, Ruth is left to make sense of their slippery breakup while decoding her fleeting sightings of him around San Francisco—or is she simply seeing people who resemble him? A difficult relationship with a clingy new dancer named Emeline, persistent memories of her entanglement with an older man named Charlie, and a new gig as a dominatrix bring Ruth deeper down the rabbit hole as she grapples with her aversion to emotional vulnerability.

The novel may take readers into San Francisco’s sexual underground, but Soft Core is more introspective than it is titillating. Ruth’s interactions with her co-workers and clients don’t just distract her from Dino’s sudden disappearance—they also help her reframe her romantic past and better understand her own relationships to love, loss, and longing. Gratifyingly, her healing process isn’t linear; her friends, family members, and flings find themselves struggling with similar cycles of shame and second-guessing. Yet the novel’s dreamlike ending suggests that second chances exist for those who are willing to seize them.

Recently, I had the chance to chat with my name-twin about Soft Core—as well as her own career as a dominatrix, which heavily informed the novel. We discussed the influence of gothic literature and the motif of “the haunting,” the specter of male loneliness, the psychology behind kink, and the separation of public and private personas. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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BRITTANY MENJIVAR: Much like its characters, Soft Core is hard to fit into any one genre. It deals with the realm of the erotic and is certainly thrilling, but I wouldn’t call it an erotic thriller. Some sections could be called “slice of life,” yet the novel also delves into surreal territory. I’d love to hear about the literary references that inspired you as you built this strange, specific world.

BRITTANY NEWELL: I would say that it’s a love story more than anything else. I wouldn’t call it a mystery, because that might mislead people who are really into the mystery genre—but it is mysterious, and I tried to lean into that. A lot of people on Goodreads have called it a “character study,” which I’m really into. It’s also a bildungsroman following Ruth’s delayed coming-of-age as she wanders around San Francisco and has an awakening about her own lovability—a Saturn-return bildungsroman! (Your Saturn return, which of course takes place when you’re 28 or 29, is a period of psychic upheaval that marks major shifts in who you are and what risks you feel willing to take.)

To answer your question, I’m a longtime Mary Gaitskill fangirlie—she’s the queen. I remember being 23 and sitting in the San Francisco Botanical Garden reading Because They Wanted To (1997) by Mary Gaitskill and feeling so fucking enchanted by her characters. She writes about the thorny interior worlds of women in such a lush way; she writes about women’s appetites and the things that they eat in a way that edges into the abject—I’m taken with her on so many levels. When I first started reading her writing, it was the most fleshed out, interesting portrayal of sex work that I had seen in literary fiction. Jobs like phone sex or stripping weren’t being used as scandalous plot devices or sensationalistic tools—and yet the way she writes about sex and desire is, at times, almost mundane. You can definitely see that mixture of the erotic and the mundane in Soft Core: dreamy fetish scenes are interspersed with domestic scenes. 

When I was in the final rounds of edits on my manuscript, my agent’s assistant, Mary Alice, pointed out that the book had a sort of gothic feeling. I didn’t know anything about the gothic as a literary tradition, so I did some research that really helped me tighten up the book. In my cursory understanding of gothic literature, there’s usually a haunted house, several ghosts, and the question of unfinished business. I like to think of Soft Core as a series of hauntings; in fact, I like to think about love as a haunting. Ruth is haunted by all of the Dino doppelgängers that she sees around the city, as well as the johns and ex-lovers that have come back into her life because they have unfinished business with her—or because she has unfinished business with them.

Soft Core suggests that there’s a lot in a name. In the first scene, Ruth refers to herself by her stage name, Baby, and her ex-boyfriend Dino gently pushes back, surprised to hear her using it in a domestic context. Later on, when Ruth becomes a dominatrix, she takes on the pseudonym Miss Sunday. Her co-workers also shift between names and, by extension, identities.

I’ve always been attuned to the everyday magic of a name, and how changing your name is an attempt to control how people react to you—or at least shift the dynamics around you. Even as a little kid, I would go on the computer and obsessively look up lists of baby names. There’s something satisfying about reading a census or going into a graveyard and reading names on tombstones. There’s a minor enchantment to imagining the person attached to a name, or the name attached to a person.

The one that I went back and forth on the most was the stage name for Ruth’s co-worker Emeline. That was hard to pick because I wanted it to be charged with all of these associations that Ruth projects onto Emeline; she’s the ultimate TikTok “Clean Girl” with this charmed, movie-like life. As a writer, the one thing I can be diva-esque about is the musicality of a sentence—the rhythm and cadence. I decided that the name had to be Emeline because it had three beats. Other names—like Ruth and Dino—appeared to me suddenly, with fully fleshed out characters attached. There was no doubting it or overthinking it: those were just their names, as if they had walked into the room and introduced themselves.

Emeline is an interesting choice because it has a glamorous, dramatic feel—but it could also be seen as a more old-fashioned name like Ruth.

Yeah, you don’t meet a lot of Emelines. So she could be this blank canvas, almost like a repository. She’s this blandly beautiful girl onto whom everyone projects both their baggage and their fantasies.

The conclusion of the book is ambiguous. I’m curious to know why you chose to go in that direction: was there ever a point at which you considered revealing more information, or was creating a sense of mystique always the goal?

I went through two drafts of Soft Core. In the first draft, the ending was even more ambiguous. The overwhelming feedback was: “Bitch, you need a climax—you’re edging the readers throughout the whole book and not giving them a satisfying release.” That was when the gothic literature thing came into play. I was able to draw out the idea of haunting by wondering, “What is Ruth’s unfinished business?”

I know that not everyone likes ambiguous endings, but as a reader I genuinely love them. I feel almost disappointed or patronized when everything is tied up too neatly. Maybe this is a dumb thing to say, but if you want your book to be lifelike … well, there are no tidy, neat endings in life. So, when it came to questions like Will Ruth’s heart open to Dino? or Will Dino come back? it was very intentional to leave the answer up to each reader and let each reader’s own interpretations and opinions and experiences with love color their impression of what happened. It’s been fun talking to people and asking them, “Why did you think Dino ran away?” “Do you think the Dino that Ruth encounters at the very end is him, or is it a new man she’s projecting Dino onto?” To some extent, that’s what we do with all our lovers—every new lover is a palimpsest of the old ones.

Reading, this quote stuck out to me:

I hoarded every moment of male sweetness, of cattish grace, to dwell upon later, like a nonbeliever tallying her encounters with God. After a while, I had to repent: I was wrong about men. They too liked to be safe and warm. They had blankets and nicknames, candy stashes in their desks.

The sentiment seems quietly subversive to me at a time when many attempts to address gender relations only serve to posit that some uncrossable chasm exists between men and women. As both a dominatrix and a writer exploring complex male as well as female characters, what are the most illuminating insights you’ve gathered about men and “male loneliness”?

A spin-off of your beautifully worded question that I get asked fairly often is “How has working as a dominatrix changed your opinion of or relationship to men?” I think the expectation is that I might be more impatient or a bit jaded, but the reality is that my work as a domme has given me so much more empathy in a way that I might not otherwise. As a dominatrix, you’re creating the space for a man to play at different types of gendered expression and gendered embodiment. You’re setting up a very specific dynamic where he feels safe to be soft and surrender.

A cliché about being a domme that I think is pretty accurate is that, in their real lives, a lot of my clients have high-powered jobs; they’re often in control, they’re making hard decisions, and they present as very alpha. And so, when they enter the dungeon space, they’re paying to experience ways of being that they deny themselves or don’t feel they have access to in their everyday lives. This playing can take different shapes. Sometimes, my clients want to get kicked in the balls and eventually enter “subspace”—where, through my performance of physical violence, they become very vulnerable and baby-like and need me to take care of them. And sometimes they just want to put on wigs and dance around the room to ABBA, and be told that they’re pretty, and try on different outfits and have their nails painted. Of course, I have a soft spot for those sweeter scenes. 

My job has given me a front-row seat to the ways in which toxic masculinity has harmed and hindered, and—in some cases—really disturbed men. I can’t help but be highly aware of the ways in which toxic masculinity impacts femme and nonbinary people, but we don’t often get to see exactly how it affects men. At work, I’m always in control and I don’t feel unsafe; I’m the one calling the shots, creating this fantasy world. So I get to have this really raw, uncensored, specific experience with my clients and witness them trying on different modalities—I get to make that feel fun for them, and not so scary. You see this in relationships too: you have your onstage self for strangers, and then you have your offstage self for intimates, which is more fretful, pandering. We all have selves that we don’t show to other people. Working as a dominatrix, I get to see the selves that my clients might not even show to their partners and certainly don’t show to their friends. It’s a learning experience, for sure. 

I noticed that throughout Soft Core, you emphasize kink as something playful rather than pathological—a sort of “playing pretend” that helps people discover new facets of themselves. I’d love to hear you talk more about this philosophy; it’s such a refreshing deviation from the norm in a media landscape where so many books and films depict kink as a result of trauma.

What is kink but a specific expression of fantasy? As a person, I’m very fantasy-driven; I don’t see the kinky expression of fantasy as all that different from the expression of fantasy that takes the form of reading and writing. You’re forming these alternate realities where you can try out different ways of feeling or being.

The myth that all kinks stem from some sort of trauma can be frustrating. I always find it interesting to ask subs, “When did you first start realizing that you had these desires?” Often, there’s a deeply felt connection to media—not that images in films necessarily cause a fetish or kink, but many people have a moment of clarity in their childhoods, when they saw something in a book or commercial or movie that moved them in a different way, that awakened this new realm of feeling. Someone was telling me about watching the scene in Men in Black II (2002) where one of the main characters is tied up and there’s this evil alien lady, and she’s tall and gorgeous, like a domme. She sticks her tongue in his ear—but she’s an alien, so it becomes this long black worm shooting through his brain. My client was like, “When I saw that, this whole new part of my brain completely lit up in response to that image.” The fantasy of a movie or the fantasy of a book can embody the fantasies one holds in their heart or their head, or wherever you want to locate desire. 

At one point in the book, there’s a conversation about whether or not Emeline is secretly writing about her experience—and (it’s implied) potentially objectifying her co-workers by turning them into characters. I’m curious about your thoughts on sex workers writing about sex, as an author in the genre yourself.

I remember writing that part. On one hand, it was a joke; on the other, it was also a nod to the anthropological view that the literary world and the film world have of sex work. The film world, in particular, is deeply guilty of pathologizing it from the outside, but also fetishizing it and mining it for the things that feel juicy and obscure about it. 

Right now—understandably—there’s heavy emphasis in the literary world on authenticity and writing from a place of “lived experience.” One can absolutely see that as a reaction to, for example, a novel like Memoirs of a Geisha (1997), which was written by a white man. When it comes to depictions of sex work though, I’m not so stringent about authenticity: I don’t necessarily believe you can’t write about something if you’ve never done it. Still, there does have to be a deep level of empathy and connection to and knowledge of that world. And if you can’t get it right, then you should give your manuscript to sensitivity readers—and if it’s not true to their experience, then you should fucking listen or maybe write about something that’s closer to home. I was a sensitivity reader for a book, and it was so clear that the author hadn’t even done a cursory amount of research and was writing based on loose cultural ideas that we all have. It was so frustrating. 

I try not to feel territorial. The highest compliment is when I get DMs from people who are like, “I was a stripper, and you really spoke to my experience, and I felt like I could smell the dressing room, and I related to the way that you talked about the dudes.” I’m not just writing for sex workers; the initial urge is always to write the book that I myself want to read. But I was hoping to write something that would really resonate with people, and place them deeply into a world they knew well or a world they had never been to before. There are readers who haven’t worked in these fields developing empathy for Ruth and seeing themselves in her—because, at the end of the day, she is a girl in love, and who can’t relate to that? For me, the great pleasure of reading is when an author does the work of naming a feeling or experience for you, and you get this ecstatic burst of recognition. My hope would be that readers feel that recognition, in whatever form it takes, with Soft Core: whether it’s a former stripper being like, “Fuck yeah,” or someone who has no idea about these worlds being like, “Oh, I understand what it feels like to be young and heartbroken.”

In your interview with NPR, you discussed how empathy and curiosity are key to both novel writing and your work as a dominatrix.

Being a dominatrix and being a writer are very similar. You need empathy and curiosity and an attraction to otherness or edges—and an imagination. There are times when I’m in a scene at the dungeon and we’re role-playing and it feels like improv: we’re Yes, and–ing, and I have to think on my feet and build a world. And of course, building that world requires words, as well as actions and tools and costumes. My favorite writers all have a playfulness about them, which I think a good domme should have as well. There are times when a sub and I will lock eyes and laugh at something that happened … but then we keep it moving, keep the world alive.

I’m wondering if you also find the two jobs similar because of the expectation to put on a show in some way or another. Especially in the age of social media and the “Literary It Girl,” do you ever feel pressured to project a certain image as an author? (This is a question I often find myself navigating!)

One thing that has been sort of challenging for me has been seeing the conflation of the author with the main character. Because I’m so open about doing sex work and living in San Francisco, people sometimes make an assumption that the main character is me or that Soft Core is autofiction, or even a memoir. I see some people on Goodreads calling it a memoir, and that’s frustrating because I feel very different from Ruth. I do understand the slippage—and someone did reframe it for me in a way that actually softened things. They were like, “Think about the intimacy you feel when a book resonates with you: you feel a sort of ownership over that book and that story and that character, and maybe trying to conflate the character with the author is a way to extend that sense of intimacy to the author and feel as if you know them in the same way that you know the character.” Of course, I’m absolutely guilty of doing this too, without even realizing it (for example, assuming that the author and the main character look alike). So, thinking about it as this misguided but well-intentioned form of intimacy has made me have more empathy toward those readers—and empathy is the reason for the season! 

Self-promotion is difficult. I try to strike a balance between being earnest and self-deprecating. I will never be the type of author who has a self-serious, black-and-white author headshot where they’re wearing a black turtleneck or something. I don’t want to come off as a Joan Didion wannabe. Going back to the power of a name: I don’t know if you’ve experienced this as a Brittany, but I love the bimbo aura attached to the name Brittany. I like the idea of the “Literary Bimbo” cutting through the self-seriousness of the literary world, uplifting the bimbo as a cultural figure who has her own special vision, and marrying serious authordom and playful bimbohood. To me, that’s a really beautiful and self-satisfying little niche to be in. I try to lean into that and make fun of myself and not get too high on my own supply.

Growing up as a Brittany, people would call me Britney Spears all the time. I used to get annoyed, but now I feel a kinship with her whenever someone makes that association. As for autofiction—I feel like its popularity has encouraged readers to latch on to any similarities they can identify between a character and an author. People have come up to me after I’ve read fictional stories and said things like, “I can’t believe that happened to you.”

If my book was actually a memoir, that would be me admitting to doing deeply fucked up things ranging from immoral to illegal! Why would I state that all so plainly?

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Brittany Newell is a writer and performer whose work has been published in Granta, n+1, The New York Times, Joyland, Dazed, and Playgirl. She published her debut novel, Oola (2017), at the age of 21. She lives in San Francisco.

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Featured image: Photo of Brittany Newell by Marissa Leitman.