Concertina: An Erotic Memoir of Extravagant Tastes and Extreme Desires

by Susan Winemaker

Book Overview

Susan Winemaker has lived a life that many women secretly desire, but few admit to... Concertina is the tale of a young chef who abandons her life in the restaurant kitchens of London to satisfy an appetite of a different kind and become one of the most well-known and respected dominatrixes on the city's S&M scene. This is a delicious memoir from Susan Winemaker that spans five years, employs all the tools of her various trades -- copper bowls, tarte...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312366728
• ISBN13: 9780312366728
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The Joys and Sorrows of a Dominatrix

Susan Winemaker describes herself as a "nice Jewish girl from Toronto". She majored in philosophy and the culinary arts, and presumably because the former would not pay, went to study the latter in London. But as everyone knows, learning to be a chef and being a chef-for-hire is not as lucrative as being a dominatrix, and this is where she turned her talents. In _Concertina: The Life and Loves of a Dominatrix_ (St. Martin's Press), Winemaker gives an account of her work in a trade of administering discipline and pain to men who think it worth, say, 150 pounds an hour to be treated in such a way. It's an odd career, although it is one long associated with sexuality, especially in England. It has plenty of peculiar moments and fun which Winemaker enjoys and writes about with amusement; the first sentence of the book is, "It's 11:25 a.m. and I'm sitting on and suffocating Bernie". The work is delivering a service for a fee, and is full of day-to-day, practical tasks just to get the job done, as in "At 2:13 I was on my hands and knees, wiping semen off the dungeon floor. At 2:17 I was eating a hummus sandwich in the garden, and answering the telephone to a man who was interested in catheters and other medical procedures. At 2:30 I answered the door to a stranger named Robert ..." She was good at her trade, and had plenty of repeat clients handled with just the right degree of pain and remove. When she "blurred the boundaries" between mistress and client and took one on as a lover, the results are more disturbing than anything that happened in her dungeon. There is plenty of food in the book, and many comparisons made between serving up a meal and serving up domination. Serving up something delicious for the client is part of both of her trades, and she writes that "pain, violence, discipline and a good grasp of the trade's tools could produce something succulent and beautiful". She does like the game she plays as Mistress Anna and she likes the men. She had a session with "Enema Larry" who liked her to be in rubber nurse uniform, and afterwards he went to kiss her goodbye on the cheek. "I backed away just in time," she writes. "'I don't want you to catch my cold, Larry.'" The response: "'Oh, but, Anna, I _want_ your cold,' he instantly volleyed. It was the kindest thing anyone had said to me in the cottage. A beautiful thing to say. I loved my job for moments like that, for unexpected intimacies born of strange circumstances." It is illuminating that when she was preparing for her career, she not only read fetish magazines and rope-tying manuals, but also Stanislavski's _Building a Character_ and _An Actor Prepares_. She writes of the accord between her and clients, "There will be no 'sex' as it's understood. It will be my job to administer pain erotically and expertly... a symphony in the background, a range of sensations assailing me, the brief connection, the spice of anonymous intimacy, the distilled concentrated moment. I

Provocative and Interesting Read

Susan Winemaker's plunges the reader into Anna's life as a Chef, dom/top, and woman. I really enjoyed how the writing would veer between her writing about cooking and then move in italics to her sessions with Bernie or some other client. The cooking pieces were my favourite, since not only does she have a way with words, but it was truly delicious to have detail what she was going to make or what she was merely thinking about cooking. This isn't a torrid love story in the fashion of _Story of O_, but it does have it's lurid pockets for those who care. This is Winemaker's first book and I look forward to her next.