My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up [Paperback]

Stephen Elliott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Elliott's previous episodic novel, Happy Baby, was about a masochistic man, Theo, who was coming to terms with being an abused juvenile. The narrator of these 11 linked tales, usually called Theo, practices "consensual sadomasochism." Over the course of the book, he goes from being down and out in Amsterdam to eventual success as a West Coast writer whose "current friends went to Ivy League schools." In "Other Desires," Theo gets a black eye from Ambellina, who also smothers him by sitting on his face and puts a ball gag in his mouth while they watch Casablanca. In "I'll Love You Back," Theo's writes with the butt plug that girlfriend Eden has ordered him to wear firmly in place. Between Theo's granular descriptions of being hurt and the generic, robo-dom quality of the gals who hurt him (distinguished mostly by thickness of thigh and color of hair), the stories all tend to blur together in a sexual vacuum, with funny descriptions of Theo's improving quotidian in between—which is the point: torture, repetition and teasing are the focus of Theo's life and his work. As Theo explains in "Other Desires": "We've never had sex. We won't have sex." (Oct.)
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Review

"An amazing and beautiful and powerful book.... I can't think of a more courageous writer than Stephen Elliott. At the center of these stories of his degradations is, I think, a rare kind of love. He is beaten until he weeps so that he can be held while he cries. But this book isn't all pathos and blood and sex -- it's also very funny. So Stephen Elliott can do it all -- he can freak you out and he can make you laugh. What more could you want from a writer?" -- Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!

"Stephen Elliott describes the sexual and emotional terrain in a voice that is at once feral and sweet, straightforward and complicated, devastating and funny as hell." -- San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Stephen Elliott knocks my fishnet stockings off." -- Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife

"There's an emotional courage to these stories, and a sense of urgency, that are thrilling to encounter. Elliott writes as if his life depended on each sentence." -- The Believer

"[A] profound, distilled work of art…drink it and be transformed." -- Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

"[Elliott is] a master of muted prose.... He conveys unmet yearning with a poignancy that is universal." -- San Francisco Chronicle

Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Cleis Press; First Edition edition (October 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573442550
• ISBN-13: 978-1573442558
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #630,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "This could have been a memoir. It isn't. Most of it is true.", September 1, 2006

By 

Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up (Paperback)

Stephen Elliott's girlfriend (using a rather loose definition of the term) does, in fact, come to the city and beat him up. The cover of this slim collection of stories conveys the contents quite effectively. It features pin-up sexy red-head in slick black vinyl with her high heel pointed menacingly at the reader.

As a reviewer, I am faced with the challenge of communicating how powerful Elliott's narrative is, without just cutting and pasting an entire short story right here. My personal proclivities do not include the S&M lifestyle, but Elliott was able take me inside the mind of a lost, painfully confused, desperate man seeking sexual release and affirmation via domination by beautiful, powerful women. The sexual escapades, Elliott has stated in interviews, are all true, and they are recounted in intense, fervent detail. Elliott seeks sex in Amsterdam, Berlin, and ultimately San Francisco. He strips for money, exchanges sex for money and drugs, engages in long-term relationships with a woman who has a husband and a slave on the side in addition to our author, has weekly appointments for domination, and again, and again, desperately seeks submission to the next level of pain and helplessness. Along the way, he gives the reader a glimpse of the sexual and emotional abuse from his childhood, but always in a straightforward manner with nary a trace of pity.

Elliott is not writing for shock value, but for truth and beauty in his quest for pleasure and love. Beauty, in this case, is bittersweet, but still poetic and sincerely moving. Trust me--the best introduction to Elliot is to dive in to the first chapter. You won't be able to put this story collection down, though, so buy his book before you try out the first chapter. I finished it in one evening. I was reviewing an advance copy, and I usually pass those along to friends or the library, but in the case of this book, it is becoming a treasured part of my library. I'll also be purchasing a few copies for friends.

Looking forward to the next collection, Mr. Elliott!

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, September 22, 2006

By 

M. Bell (Ann Arbor, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up (Paperback)

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.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I Expected A Lot Based On What I'd Heard But This Book Did Not Fulfill Expectations, January 28, 2008

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up (Paperback)

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...