Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

I’ve seen the light—and I’m in it, as the next Anaï s Nin!

What would I do if my ex didn’t have a PhD? He enlightens me on all sorts of things.

To back up, I have a crushingly boring freelance assignment to write profiles of people who are making gobs of money. Most of them are in the technology sector, which makes the assignment even more boring because the executives all use the same jargon. I struggle to figure out what they do and am more interested if they’re around my age and single.

I need to write 85 of them in three weeks; that’s about five a day to meet the deadline. I can’t turn it down because it’s worth two mortgage payments and then some.

My ex, whom I live with because we can’t afford to live apart, sent me email about Nin and the erotic porn she wrote. He said after World War II, the now-dead novelist Henry Miller began writing the highly sexually charged prose that made him famous. These works included Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, which because of censorship couldn’t be published in the United States.

Meanwhile, his colleague and muse, Anaïs Nin, created a distinctly female voice and produced erotica for a specialized market. She was an immense talent and made money by writing sex stories for individual customers, which only they got to read.

This brilliant woman was more or less a literary prostitute for a time, so that she could support herself (Hey that sounds like me!).  Later, she left this hack work behind and went on to great achievement.  He asked me to bear that in mind as I write these stupid profiles.

But I’d rather spin a sexy tech bio. Michael Jons (not his real name), chief executive of IT International (made-up, too), builds infrastructure backbones that rock, not only for the feds but for his mistress who squeals for tie wraps when she’s slammed against the racks. Or, Susan Lee (name also fake) integrates engineering and education when she sends two divas to fulfill her client’s fantasy of a threesome. Susan, I’m qualified for both, in no particular order.