Blogger misses the 'satisfaction' of prostitution
Friday November 27 2009
A SCIENTIST who unmasked herself as the blogging call girl Belle de Jour has admitted that she misses the satisfaction of "doing a job well" since giving up prostitution.
Brooke Magnanti was speaking on last night's 'Book Show' on Sky Arts 1/HD, her first public appearance since admitting almost two weeks ago that she wrote the blog about her experiences as a call girl, which was turned into bestselling books and a television series.
Dr Magnanti said: "I miss the moment when you walk into a hotel, and get that feeling of, 'I'm about to do a job and I'm about to do it well'."
Her nom de plume may endure. "I think there might be a bit left in Belle de Jour yet," she said.
On the programme Dr Magnanti discussed literary influences with the Booker winner Hilary Mantel. She said that she was inspired by the character Julien Sorel in Stendhal's 1830 novel 'The Red and The Black', who could "see what he must do to get ahead, but who sabotages himself over and over again before realising that love is all he is made for".
Dr Magnanti turned to prostitution while working on her PhD thesis at the University of Sheffield. She now works at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. She described meeting her first client. "You do turn on an aspect of your personality. . . Belle is the more confident part of me. Belle isn't the part of me that when someone opens the door, is thinking. 'Do I look all right?'. Belle has to walk in and feel she looks all right."
Asked by Mariella Frostrup, the show's presenter, why she wrote a blog, Dr Magnanti said: "If I hadn't been writing about it I would have been more apt to blurt it out to my friends. It gave me an outlet."
She denies any shame. "It wasn't so much that I was ashamed, but I was afraid of other people's reactions," she said.
A widespread assumption that the blog was by a man amused her. "There is something, perhaps, about the scientific training that makes you a little bit more divorced from the emotional side of it." (©, The Times, London)
- Adam Sherwin in London
Irish Independent
