Author of the week: Brooke Magnanti

last updated 8 January 2015

It turns out that the “great male fantasy” of a prostitute who enjoys her work sometimes actually exists, said India Knight in the London Sunday Times. Six years ago,the appearance of a blog, written under the pseudonym “Belle de Jour,” created one of the literary mysteries of the decade. Finally a 34-year-old medical researcher has stepped forward to admit that the blog, the best-selling memoirs, and the Showtime series that followed were all products of her own 14-month stint as a high-priced London call girl. Dr. Brooke Magnanti, an American-born epidemiologist, insists she doesn’t regret selling her body. “I’ve felt worse about my writing than I ever have about sex for money,” she says. Yet she only went public because a tabloid investigation was closing in on her identity.

Magnanti rejects any suggestion that her story unduly glamorizes prostitution, said Ryan Hagen in TheNewYorkTimes.com. In 2003, she was working on her Ph.D. and struggling to pay her rent when she inquired about employment at an escort service. She says she then accepted “between dozens and hundreds” of assignations without suffering any abuse. “Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn’t,” she says. “You can’t say I’m not real, and that my experience isn’t real.” Magnanti even claims that her career as a cancer researcher offers chances to draw upon the lessons she learned as a $500-an-hour call girl. “It taught me [the] power of being a decent-looking blond woman in the world,” she says. “Leveraging my sexuality to promote my work? You bet.”