My Girlfriend Comes to the City and
Beats Me Up by Stephen Elliott
A True Path
This blistering new collection from literary rising star Stephen Elliott
demonstrates once again why his books have been praised as “graceful,”
“soaring,” and “fearless.” As with all of Elliott’s work, these stories have the
raw ring of truth filtered through the author’s downbeat-poetic sensibility.
My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up follows the narrator on a
dizzying ride through past and present, from a group home for troubled
adolescents in Chicago where he loses his virginity to shooting galleries
and homeless encampments in San Francisco where he searches for
deeper and darker thrills. In “Other Desires,” a flood of unsettling memories
backgrounds the narrator’s involvement with a loose-knit family of lost
souls. “Tears” explores the disturbing complexities of an S/M Internet
hook-up. Several of the stories feature the enigmatic Eden, the narrator’s
polyamorous mistress. With My Girlfriend, Elliott confirms his status as a
major young writer of a kind of literary fiction that recalls the work of Genet
and Bukowski.
Personal Review: My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me
Up by Stephen Elliott
The real question in Stephen Elliott's short story collection My Girlfriend
Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is not whether these tales are
autobiographical or not (though Elliott admits that many are true, or mostly
true, in his introduction), but whether Elliott, as narrator, consents to, and
likes or does not like, the kinky acts described herein. In powerful, waste-
no-words prose, Elliott takes readers on a guided tour through the
underbelly of San Francisco and into his narrator's sex life, mental state,
and troubled childhood. The city of the book's title plays a major role in
these stories, but Elliott is clear to distinguish his version of BDSM from the
"safe, sane and consensual" model best embodied by the City by the Bay's
kinksters. This distinction is explicitly stated several times throughout My
Girlfriend Comes... and the power dynamics behind his interest in kink are

what make this an emotionally compelling, disturbing and vital read. Each
tenet of "safe, sane and consensual" is revisited again and again until it's
anyone's guess which side the stories fall on.
During the scenes Elliott describes, he often asks questions for which
there is no answer. In the title story, his girlfriend comes to visit and duly
beats him up, but it;s her words that leave the harshest blows. When she
says "I'm not your mother reincarnate," his immediate reaction is: "And I'm
thinking why would she say that? Who would say such a god-awful thing,"
then later, "I didn't check the box that says 24/7. I didn't sign up for this
kind of lifestyle. I didn't want this. But I don't know what I want, I never
have. And she's always been honest with me, and I've done nothing but lie
to her. Then I'm crying more, and soon I can't stop crying." He pushes
himself into unfamiliar situations, constantly questioning them and what he
wants from these scenes. Through outthe book, it's clear that BDSM is
both a physical act and a pathway to some emotional salve. He looks to
strong, dominant women to steer him toward where he should go. In the
opening story, "First Things First," set in Amsterdam, he writes, "She didn't
ask what I liked, which was good because I had no idea what I liked or
what I was into or what I wanted to do or wanted done to me." This theme
reappears even as he gains knowledge about why he craves submission
and what he prefers, much of which involves offering himself to women to
take, test, and hurt him.
Elliott throws traditional erotica to the wind and complicates matters,
mixing emotional pain and physical pleasure, and vice versa, until it's often
unclear where one ends and the other begins. He doesn't seek to separate
sex and kink from Real Life, so in the middle of a story about wearing a
gas mask, he jumbles together his suffocation wth what's happening
beyond their limited play space: "We don't know that her husband has
been leaving messages on my phone. Her mother is OK. Her mother
doesn't have cancer. It's just scar tissue. The phone is turned off. I can't
breathe and I'm shaking my head, no no no no." The words rush at the
page until finally she praises him with "Good boy," and for the narrator, "It's
the only thing in the world worth hearing." It's these absolute statements of
pure, raw need, the kind that we so often cover up but here Elliott thrusts
forward, as if opening a Band-aid to reveal red, tender skin, an act he's
compelled to do again and again, that make this slim volume a keeper. In
the same story, he moves seamlessly from his lover, Eden, hitting him so
hard that "[t]he animal I sound like doesn't exist yet" to being hit by his
father, the two permanently entwined, one consensual, one not. It's this
admissionthat there is no unraveling his abusive childhood from his chosen
masochismthat is both startling, brave, and often uncomfortable (in the
best way possible) to read.
In his introduction, Elliott writes of the political necessity for sharing our
sexuality, especially of the BDSM variety, with the world: "It is in
everyone's best interest for more people to be open about their sexual
desires." While I happen to agree with him on that score, these

interconnected stories lack the over-the-top blaring messages of
propaganda, and offer a different motive: to make sense of, and simply
declare, that he exists, that he is not succumbing to any forces other than
his own will. Even as he writhes in pain, he points out that it's pain he
wants, and will struggle and fight for.
Elliott's writing is straightforward and direct, but no less powerful for its
simplicity. The themes repeated throughout the stories, of searching,
connection, disappointment, desire, and love, echo strongly by the end. He
doesn't apologize for the desires that drive his protagonist, even when they
get him in over his head. Perhaps the political message here is that even if
what we want and need sexually is not truly safe, sane or consensual, it's
our right to pursue it, to pursue pain that may not necessarily bring clarity,
pleasure, or wisdom, that may in fact simply invite more pain; in Elliott's
world, that pain is a prism through which to see himself anew. These
stories will likely make you flinch, recoil, and marvel not just as Elliott's
ability to transform his past into an aggressively kinky present, but also his
remarkably simple yet ruthlessly honest way of bringing sex onto the page,
not as simple titillation or sensationalism, but as part and parcel of the
drama, pain, and work of life itself. By pushing readers, and himself, into
the darkest places he can go, he shines light on the often-hidden lives of
submissive men and forces us to confront all the ugliness and beauty
contained therein.
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