Professional dominatrix Brittany Newell’s second novel, Soft Core, follows 27-year-old stripper Ruth (or Baby) as she searches, increasingly madly, for her stylish, ketamine dealer boyfriend, Dino, who one day goes missing from their home in San Francisco. Ruth’s search for Dino parallels with her unraveling, as she tries to fill the void of her longing with work and unconventional relationships, including a correspondence with a man with a suicide fetish who signs his emails “Nobody” and an aloof new girl at the strip club who reminds her of someone from her past.

While Soft Core is indisputably sexy, it’s also a nearly tactile portrait of the senses. Newell proves herself to be a writer in tune with both the physical and emotional realm, as she describes feelings and smells with equal deftness. The result is an atmospheric dreamscape of a book that’s ultimately an exploration of yearning, unusual intimacies, love and revenge, fueled by the pacing of a noir. While compulsively readable, Soft Core lingers like the cloud of perfume that can follow a beautiful woman, a real California dream. Finishing Soft Core felt like walking out of a bar and having no idea what time it was, to find yourself alone on the sidewalk on a foggy night, looking up at the neon sign of the bar before deciding to walk home.

I called Newell, who squealed excitedly about karaoke and quoted Foucalt with the same level of enthusiasm, on an afternoon in January. We talked about honesty and desire, the freeing power of a disguise, her go to karaoke song and more. 

Ariél M. Martinez: Tell me how this book came to be.

Brittany Newell: I wrote it when I was 27 after the first time in my life where I wasn’t working on anything which was very existentially troubling for me as someone who functions best when I have a writing project to funnel all of my neuroses and observations into. It appeared after a period of fermentation where I wasn’t writing and what really facilitated it was that I got a grant from the city of San Francisco, the San Francisco Individual Artist Grant, and that reignited my belief that I was actually a writer, not just a wayward loser. I was able to rent office space in North Beach in San Francisco for really cheap—because COVID all of the techies and people with regular jobs had emptied out. I made it my 9-5 job, going to the office and working. I had been fermenting all of these ideas about writing about a stripper and wanted to find the best receptacle for all of my dominatrix and dungeon stories. I had previously tried to channel them into a book of essays called My Body and Other Conspiracy Theories, which never saw the light of day. In the end, a fictional universe with a more fluid character who has elements of me but isn’t me ended up being the most generous receptacle for all of the sex work observations and funny stories and tragedies that I always wanted to share in a way that was funny but also earnest. I’d never had the experience before of writing where everything flowed out of me almost like independently. I’d never had such an ecstatic writing experience: sitting down and wondering what was going to happen that day. Every writer chases the high of a flow state but you can’t force it. Writing a rough draft of Soft Core was six months of the most addictive flow state.

AM: How long have you been in San Francisco?

BN: Eight years.

AM: I’m interested in how you thought about infusing San Francisco into the book – it’s so alive and textured and feels like a character in the book itself. 

BN: I do think of San Francisco as a character that Ruth is engaging with. The book is a love story that’s about Ruth’s relationship to Dino but also her less obvious romances with other characters and in a way her romantic relationship with San Francisco, which is how I feel about it. Sometimes I’m like, why are you making it so hard for me? But then the hills at twilight are just so irresistible that I just get knocked-kneed for San Francisco all over again and defend it to everyone. It’s such a beautiful and enchanting and strange and fucked up city. Sometimes I worry that it’s a shortcoming of mine that everything I write has to be set in San Francisco but then again I’m kind of sick of every contemporary fiction novel being set in an ambient, coffee shop version of Brooklyn. When I was reworking it with my agent Annie (Dewitt) and her assistant Mary Alice (Stewart), it was Mary Alice who pointed out that the book had a bit of a noir vibe—sleazy, ’90s erotic thriller—and that really helped hone in on the climax of the book where Ruth is seeking revenge from someone from her past. I liked thinking of San Francisco as this very noir landscape that has this sleaziness and griminess that characterizes a lot of ’90s thrillers, like “Basic Instinct” is set in San Francisco.

AM: Hitchcock has films set in San Francisco and I feel like there’s a Hitchcock element to Soft Core with seeing doubles or lookalikes… What were you exploring with imitation and doubles?

BN: There’s the question of mirroring and doppelgangers with Ruth seeing Dino all over the city and later there’s a question of identity. Is this someone she knew or is that a new person that she’s projecting Dino on which, like it or not, is how we engage with new lovers—finding the things that remind you of the people that who hurt you and hoping that this person will do it differently and maybe being attracted to the wisp of past lovers about them. Nothing I write is meant to be a solid statement about “this is what sex work is like” or “this is what domming is like”… It’s always my own musings of what’s funny or resonant. Towards the end, Ruth reveals the name of the strip club, and I’m invoking this image of a fog filled room with interchangeable porno angels floating around in the mist. I think it’s that image of interchangeability of women’s bodies on display or being for sale that is baked into the fantasy rules of whatever type of sex work the girls are engaged with. There’s a level of projection with Ruth in love with a new person and projecting Dino on it, and there’s another yearning of a John hiring a girl and projecting whoever on her. So there’s a mirroring quality that happens in both romance and transactional sex experiences. There’s a flickering quality to identity that can make sex work fun but also can take a toll on your psyche, which we see with Ruth where she’s losing her grip with what is real and what is imagined both because of her broken heartedness and this shifty underworld that she’s immersed in where there’s a defined, baked in slippage between the flesh and the fantasy which is what makes it exciting but also confusing if you’re in that world for too long.

AM: Do you think about dungeons or strip clubs as liminal spaces?

BN: Absolutely, they’re completely liminal. Almost everything about the Dream House, the dungeon in the book, is not made up. The dungeon is a suburban house on a quiet cul-de-sac where you have to know what it is for it to transmogrify to this place of fantasy or ecstasy, so it exists in that liminal space of knowing and not knowing. A strip club is less so but it’s still the same thing of paying a toll to come in and there’s a liminality that you can choose who you want to be when you enter these spaces and the girls working there are also choosing who they want to be. I’ve used this word but the word slippage is really important to these spaces and as a writer I’m always attracted to stories and experiences of slippage and the shifty line between the flesh and the fantasy. 

AM: As a sex worker you have such a unique window into desire. What do you think is the relationship between honesty and desire? 

BN: It’s sort of like when you put on a disguise it makes you able to be more honest because there’s a screening function. Ruth reflects on this at some point in the book where she’s engaging with literal strangers but at the same time these strangers are telling her things they’ve never told their wife or therapist or best friend so there’s this strange, heady combination of naked honesty and obfuscation of who they are and how much money they make and if they’re married. It makes me think of this client that I saw the other day who walked in presenting as a conventional cis man who wanted humiliation and to be kicked in the balls and hinted at some sissy stuff. We started the session and he’s very shy and I was trying to humiliate him so I was like, dance for me, do a sexy strip tease, take off your North Face or whatever. He was so awkward and he had just mentioned the sissy thing but I had a sense there was so much more that he wanted in that. I went to the closet and found the first tattered-ass blonde wig I could find and blindfolded him and set him up in front of the mirror and got out some muumuu for him to wear. Then everything changed. I was like, open your eyes, and I took off the blindfold and wanted to force him to reckon with his reflection—and of course part of it was humiliation but the demeanor totally changed. Then I was like, do a strip tease for me and they were really getting into it and feeling really sexy and feeling themselves. Sissies have this interesting, complicated thing. There are some clients where I’m like, you’re a fucking man through and through and for you, you want to be dressed as a sissy because the most humiliating and most debased thing to be is a woman, so that’s where that’s coming from. But for people like my client, which it isn’t for me to speculate if they’re secretly an egg or trans, that’s not for me to have access to—but what I have access to is that in the two hour session, we had this moment of transformation that I could really see. Once he was in the wig and I was calling her she and a slut and a bad girl, I could see that there was this palpable shift. I don’t know exactly what it was but something more honest was coming through. It was one of those moments where I was just like, oh this is so raw and I felt really lucky to facilitate it and behold it and be a container for this thing, which whatever it is… whether it was a fetish or something deeper and more identity based… but whatever it was, it was powerful and very honest and was made possible by this shitty disguise of this blonde wig that made this person feel so sexy.

AM: That’s so moving and must have been so beautiful to see that transformation. I went to this strip club in Portland where there’s karaoke with dancers performing… it’s very fun but there was this one man who sang this really earnest love song and it was so honest, I started tearing up. It was just such an earnest expression of desire and admiration that was really beautiful and I think about it a lot.

BN: Dude, I know exactly what you mean. I’ve had similar karaoke experiences where it’s this unassuming person and then there’s something really raw. Karaoke is actually a really interesting example of what we’re talking about because that’s another form of identity slippage: to briefly embody the pop star whose lyrics you’re borrowing.

AM: What’s your karaoke song?

BN: I usually do “Hurt” by Johnny Cash or “Jolene” is always a crowd pleaser.

AM: Classic. I love karaoke, we need more karaoke in books. Speaking of strip clubs, I’m a perfume freak and loved how perfume is everywhere in the depiction of the strip club. Can you talk about your relationship to perfume? And what perfume would you pair with Soft Core?

BN: This is such a prescient question. Anna Dorn who wrote Perfume and Pain does this bespoke curation of perfumes. She said she wanted to pick out some perfumes based on the description of the perfumes in Soft Core which was so exciting to me. I love amber and sandalwood and smokiness and incense… I’m a big slut for incense. But to bring it back to the book, I didn’t realize that I was so hyper attuned to smells until I was shopping the novel around and I sent it to Bill Clegg who turned it down but he wrote a really sweet and thoughtful message praising the book and said that he’d never read so many different descriptions of the way that bodies smell. That was the first time I was like oh I guess I’m really obsessed with smell as a writer, I knew I was as a person. I feel that perfume and clothes are the closest thing we have to everyday magic in terms of transforming the atmosphere that you’re in and kind of being able to cast a spell and control how you’re treated that day or what might happen. Perfume and clothes really feel like creating portals for different possibilities or engagement with the people you’re around. I got a sample of this perfume Encens Suave that’s described as a carnal vanilla, and I think that’s what Soft Core as a perfume would smell like. Sweet but also fleshy.

AM: Do you use perfume to write?

BN: I don’t, I use music. There’s a lot of music throughout the book: songs that the girls dance to, songs on the radio, love songs, songs that people remember. I have a playlist that’s the Soft Core playlist.

AM: There’s a tension between romance and absence in the book, can you talk about that?

BN: I think it’s Lacan who says there can be no desire without lack. There has to be something missing or not entirely present in order to long. When people ask what the book is about and I don’t feel up for describing the plot, I say it’s about longing. The longing you feel as a 27-year-old and the longing you feel on a foggy night walk through San Francisco’s Chinatown, the longing you feel within a relationship and the longing you feel when they’re gone and never having that satiation. Longing is where romance and love and lack and absence meet. It really underpins all of my work if I were to zoom out and examine it. Maybe people who come from stable and happy families don’t have that relationship to love and romance or maybe they do feel a sense of satiation and completeness, but I don’t relate to that. I relate a lot more to the instability and the holiness of relationality. But also the wholeness. Both perforated and worshipful. 

AM: Can you talk about the intimacies amongst the women in the book that might not fit a conventional shape?

BN: There’s a Foucualt quote in the epigraph where he says I think now after studying the history of sex we should study the history of friendship which is very important. In a queer world where the family structure is a bit more fractal or shattered, you sometimes have very romantic relationships with your friends and non-heteronormative reliances on and entanglements with your friends. There’s different ways of people being in your life that doesn’t have to be sexual… or even me being married to my best friend in a nonsexual but very romantic and devoted way. I think it’s a reflection of my own life and my own obsession with friendship.