Quarantined in a southwestern desert city in the midst of her high-risk pregnancy, Margo Steines felt her life narrow around her growing body, compelling her to reckon with the violence entangled in its history. She was a professional dominatrix in New York City, a homestead farmer in a brutal relationship, a welder on a high-rise building crew, and a mixed martial arts enthusiast; each of her many lives brought a new perspective on how power and masculinity coalesce—and how far she could push her body toward the brink. With candor, Steines searches for the roots of her erstwhile attraction to pain while charting the complicated triumph of gentleness and love.
A difficult book, one that makes the author’s very survival seem like a matter of luck ... Steines manages to keep her reader close, writing with a rare crystalline precision as she explores her fixation with violence and with certain forms of traditional masculinity ... What elevates Steines’s book above the difficult, often extreme experiences she shares is her willingness to look honestly and objectively at her desires ... Her narrative slackens in the present day, which is set in the heat of Tucson, where she is spending the quarantine mostly inside, pregnant and cooking healthy food with her nice new partner, a fitness trainer. In describing the ordinary miracles of falling in love, of making a baby, she loses the fiercely searching quality of her earlier history.
Through her explorations, she gains new understanding about relating to others and to her own body, harboring no regrets for the violence in her past, as it leads her to understand the power of gentle love.
Steines tackles complex, nuanced truths about power and violence through clear writing and an unflinching gaze ... The author’s skillful prose expresses pain clearly and can be challenging to read, but this discomfort is tempered by her clearheaded insights and retroactive self-empathy ... A passionate and lyrical memoir and meditation on what might drive someone to seek violence.
