Cheap I Was for Sale: Confessions of a Bondage Model (Book) (Lisa B. Falour) Price

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Customer Reviews of I Was for Sale: Confessions of a Bondage Model

Poor Choices = Poor Life
Lisa Falour states early on in her biography that she is not a good writer; she's right. The book is organized by people and events she experienced in her 20 years as a bondage model, sex worker, and sometime druggie from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. She claims she wrote this biography to explain the dangers of her choices in the hopes the others will avoid them. Unfortunately I think the book will attract mostly people wanting a sexual thrill or looking for information about the sex industry. Falour's is only one person and she wasn't really part of the management of the various forms of sexual entertainment. I don't think most young people will reach for this book. Sadly I don't think her book will attract the audience she was hoping it would given the title and the cover. It is however another book about those "good old days" of sexuality and SM that you may heard about; also another book about how those "good old days" weren't very good for most people.

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Muddle mess of meandering prose
Help! This book is in desperate need of an editor! There's a story here that should be told but "I Was For Sale" is bogged down by the writing style of author Lisa B. Falour.

I really wanted to like this book. I had hopes that it'd perhaps pick up where Shawna Keeney's I Was A Teenage Dominatrix (see CdC #11) left off. A former zinester and bondage model, Falour's life is rife with tawdry (and poignant) tales, yet Falour's writing often left me scratching my head, wondering to where she was going and from where she had come. Falour skips willy-nilly from decade to decade from paragraph to paragraph. I finally had to put the book down when I got to the first page of chapter four and found myself completely lost in the maze of Falour's life-a labyrinth that one would hope she'd navigate rather than compound. I valiantly struggled to pick up the thread that weaves Falour's tales together. I've known people who talk like Falour writes and I try to avoid getting into conversations with them.

Four chapters may sound like a half-hearted effort, but reading Falour's work after proofreading CdC was driving me a bit bonkers. I itched for a pen to rewrite lines like, "I saw him in person recently and he looked great and seemed extremely fit. He didn't seem to be 82 years old at all-he seemed quite a bit younger." Perhaps a synonym (or two) for "seem" is in order. How about "appear"? A good thesaurus, a few infinitives, and a gerund or two might pep up Falour's writing. A muddled disappointment, I hope that Falour's publisher might consider a seriously rewritten second printing of "I Was For Sale" . And, for a book subtitled "Confessions of a Bondage Model," might I suggest that such an edition might sport a few pictures-racy or otherwise! (ISBN: 1840680539)

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Memoir of an appalling and interesting time
Lisa Falour is a former "sex worker" (the term hadn't yet been coined), a raconteur who is defiant and glib, jaded and heartbreakingly hopeful all at once. Her humor is deadpan. She has an astonishing story. Part of the surprise is that she is alive to tell it. This is a dead-on memoir that is informative, sometimes painful - and intended to inform but not to arouse.

A cute, blond Midwesterner, Falour arrived in New York in the late 1970's (amidst the "smell of things falling apart"). Ambitious, not yet educated, and chronically short of money, she enrolled in a succession of colleges, art schools and, eventually, graduate programs. She also worked two jobs. At brokerage firms as a secretary or a research assistant, she wore good suits and heels. In the second job of prostitute and more - the locus of this story - Falour wore often not much more than the standard accoutrements of the sexual galaxy BDSM- and much higher heels. (Some of her johns preferred her in her office clothes - something she exploited, too.)

You may well be appalled at the job description of "bondage model" - as well as the many other things Falour did for money. She was paid to endure pain, and to mete it out. Sometimes she enjoyed herself. She liked drugging and drinking, and did lots of it. The details of what she calls her "dirty little voyages" take up a lot of this book. She minimizes the psychic (if not physical) pain of that work by asserting that "the only difference at my secretarial jobs during the day was that I was wearing clothes while men (my bosses) humiliated me."

With unconvincing insouciance Falour claims that the money drove her into it - but then, more convincingly, though not with much elaboration, she acknowledges that "low self-esteem" was motivation, too.

She's impulsive and smart and self-destructive. She married three men, lived through a series of near-disasters, and she made a lot of friends, whose portraits she draws with wit and gentle humor. The story of many of the friendships' unraveling is one of the saddest parts of the book.

This is a strange and disturbing memoir that is well worth reading. There's a portrait of a seamy underside of New York City in the late '70's and early 80's that's awfully well drawn. Readers repulsed by honest depictions of comparatively unconventional sexual acts or tolerance of unconventional behaviors might choose to skip this book. Despite Falour's claim that " at 41, my spirit is broken, I am alcoholic, and my bouts of depression are now lasting years at a time," without benefit of writing workshops or thousands of hours of psychotherapy - she has managed to succeed at telling an astonishing personal story.