The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl

This is a repost of an article that was published in The Heythrop Lion - I have to confess that I'm not desparately keen on the finished article but here it is) 

Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour. 

I’m going to make a speculation here. A large number of us know very little about prostitution. Many of you have probably never been or hired a prostitute. I certainly haven’t. In fact, my first and most meaningful experience of prostitution to date came in Fresher’s Week. Not having a laptop or enough money to go to all the Fresher’s events, I sat in my room and read The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour. The book consists of various blog posts published on the “Belle de Jour” weblog between 2003 and 2004. At this early point in the article, I want to discourage you from believing that this is the book of ITV2’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl because, although the events are ever-so-loosely based on the blog, it is also largely dissimilar. 

The book contains exactly what it says on the cover. However, this would probably be even more accurate if the book was entitled The Intimate, Explicit and sometimes just plain Icky Adventures of a Perfectly Normal Londoner. As you can probably guess, it’s mainly focused around Belle’s exploits as a £300/hour call girl but it also looks at her general “normal” life too. It’s not beautifully written. Perhaps that’s all we can expect of someone who’s a blogger and not a novelist. It certainly doesn’t make for great novel-reading and is hardly a page-turner unless what makes you turn pages is trying to find out how someone is going to be anally penetrated today. 

I think one of the reasons people tend to find this book annoying is that Belle de Jour’s life is just too gosh-darned normal. There are no scenes of her injecting heroin into her arms while her 8 illegitimate children Sesame Street. She texts her boyfriend, gets annoyed at the Underground, visits her Mum, has break-ups and buys lightbulbs. Sure, somewhere in the middle of that you’ll read about a guy peeing on her in the bath while she cries for erotic purposes but unfortunately she generally has quite a normal life. And to add to the sheer mundanity of it all, you then find out that she was using her money to fund a PhD in informatics, epistemiology and forensic science. She also used the money to buy lots of underwear but that probably goes with the territory.  

It’s probably time we sat down and accepted that sex doesn’t need to be something sensationalised. I have little doubt that the main reason that people are buying this book and subsequent others that Belle has published is because they feel that they are missing out on something and, rather than try it out themselves, want to read about someone else doing it. 

I should probably add some sort of public warning here saying that although being a high-paid prostitute may seem like a good way to pay off your student loan at the time, it may lead to, amongst other things, nuns being displeased in you. 

So, if you see yourself as the sort of person who might enjoy reading about fisting over a light lunch at Pret, then Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl is the book for you.