ravenna
Posts: 121
Joined: 12/22/2004
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i grok you totally, man! Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the all-time classic SF novels, and i understand it was a huge cult buzz in the '60s. i read my Dad's copy the first time when i was really young, i suppose it must have had some effect on me, and i've reread it a couple of times since; i went through a major Robert Heinlein phase when i was a teenager... Glory Road! The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress! The Door Into Summer! Heinlein rocked! If anybody is due for a revival, its him...
But way way way beyond SIASL for me was the one novel that's had the biggest effect on my life in every imaginable way. Reading it for the first time was an incredible breakthrough for me, and realizing i was potentially polyamorous (though i didn't know that word yet) was only one small part of it. That book was Story of O. ("Oh no, here she goes again...")
Thumbnail plot summary, just in case there's still someone who hasn't read it: O loves a man named Rene, and loves him even more after he forcibly enslaves her and hands her over to others, the members and staff of his "club" at Roissy, to use and train. Rene then shares her for awhile with his quasi-half-brother Sir Stephen, and ultimately gives her to him completely to be his personal property. O falls even more deeply in love with Sir Stephen, who seems at first not to love her at all, only her obedience. Together the two men use her to seduce and procure another woman for Rene, as her replacement, so to speak. Sir Stephen uses O even more brutally, has her further trained and marked as his property, exhibits her as if she were a work of art and lends her to yet more men for their public use. Ultimately (in the sequel) she is returned to Roissy and abandoned there by Sir Stephen to serve as one of the house prostitutes. O is given the option to leave, but she decides in the end to stay.
This sketch makes an astonishingly beautiful and erotic and even mystical book sound pretty brutal, and parts of it are in fact brutal, but my gut reaction when i read it for the first time at fifteen was, Oh my God, i'm NOT the only one in the world who's felt these feelings! i felt an enormous shock of recognition, i suddenly knew not only that i wasn't alone, but that my nameless shameful secret identity had a name, even though it was a name consisting of but a single letter, and that i could live that life, i could be O if i had the chance, that my secret internal life could perhaps someday be my real life, that i was meant to live that life or something like it, that i couldn't really live any other life, not with all my heart and soul, that i would do anything to find that life if i could, no matter where it took me, and that anything less would be nothing less than a waste of my life.
Story of O didn't turn me into anything i wasn't already or wouldn't have become anyway, but it opened my heart like a key fits a lock, it launched me forcibly down the road to accepting and embracing who and what i really always had been and would have to be. That's a lot for one little book to do for a horny, unhappy, confused fifteen-year-old girl, and i will always be enormously grateful to Pauline Reage (not her real name) for sharing it with the world, and with me.
[Edited to stamp out typos!]
< Message edited by ravenna -- 6/7/2005 11:53:53 PM >
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Question of curiosity.... - 
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