San Francisco writer Brittany Newell—a Stanford University graduate in feminist, gender and sexuality studies and comparative literature who has worked as a dominatrix—spoke with Local News Matters about her second novel, “Soft Core” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $28, February 2025). A mix of mystery, thriller and erotica loosely based on San Francisco noir films from the 1990s, the book details the adventures of a Bay Area dominatrix named Ruth whose ex-boyfriend goes missing.
Is the story in “Soft Core” like your past experiences?
Newell: … I feel the need to say clearly that it’s not a memoir. I’m not Ruth. It’s fiction and I think fiction is what enabled me to explore all of these ideas and ruminations on longing and desire and loneliness. I just love being able to intertwine my own reflections or ideas with imagination and with the freedom that comes with fiction writing. … I feel different from Ruth, but we do share a similar curiosity and attraction to new experiences or things that might seem seedy or unusual to other people. That would be the main unifying characteristic between us, that attraction to edges or alterity.
Do you remember when you came up with the plot of “Soft Core?” What was that time like?
Newell: It started out as a short story that I published in n+1 magazine. The whole first chapter was just a standalone short story. …My friend Emily Clancy, who was working at The New Yorker, was asking me questions about it. … This prompted all of this curiosity on my part, and it made the characters feel very real to me. I sort of followed that curiosity and got deep into the characters and it flowed from there.
How would you characterize Ruth’s vibes? Her thought process?
Newell: I feel like Ruth is more on the quiet side. I think she is someone who observes and watches and takes in a lot of data about the people around her. She is also an unreliable narrator, and part of the book is sort of seeing her unraveling after you know her ex-boyfriend disappears. We watch her become more and more unhinged and untethered from reality, which as a reader is always something that I have enjoyed. … The more unhinged she becomes and the spottier her reality becomes it opens up venues for more poetic descriptions and flickers between this fantasy and reality state.
Can you elaborate about the support you had in writing the novel?
Newell: I think, for any writer, that self-belief waxes and wanes, and we’ve all had periods of self-doubt and kind of wondering: Is this worth it? Is someone going to want what I am writing? It’s just very surreal when it finally all comes together. And with the publishing process, there’s so many people that work on your book with you, which is also a very novel experience considering you wrote the book in solitude. … You have to switch gears into this world where your book is now a commodity that’s owned by the publishing house and they believe in it, but they also want to make money off it. It’s a very interesting experience to go from something that’s solitary to then being collaborative and also having to surrender control of your book and know that readers will interpret it however they want.
Was it hard to have people make comments and changes to what you created?
Newell: I published a book when I was 21, called “Oola,” with another big house, Henry Holt. I was really young and naive at that time. I felt protected by my naivety because I was so grateful to be there for the ride and happy to be believed, that I didn’t realize that that the first book didn’t sell well and in the eyes of the publisher was kind of a flop. This time around, I’m older and wiser, so I’ve been super highly aware of how supportive and invested my current publishers have been. With that level of investment, there is this “people pleaser” in me. I’m worried about letting them down, but it is also an amazing feeling to have people believing in your work, and also enjoying it, and telling you how fun it was to work on and how it was different from the projects they normally work on. That is the type of thing that fuels me and keeps me going when I have my moments of writerly malaise.
How is it attending book parties and interacting with the public around your book?
Newell: Writing can be solitary … Parties and nightlife are the opposite. It’s all about connection, socializing and cutting loose, and being more in your body and less in your head. It’s exciting to be able to combine those two worlds that in my regular life are usually very separate. Mixing my daytime writing life and then my nighttime debaucherous night life, and to be able to fuse them feels so rare and exciting. The weird thing about writing a book is, it’s not like being a musician in a band or a performer where you get to see people consuming your work. I guess readings are the only version of that that writers get.
You’ve been insanely busy, but have you had time to read? What are your favorite books from the last year? Favorite writers?
Newell: I love Brontez Pernell. He wrote “100 Boyfriends” and he’s also at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I love anything that Brontez writes. [Now] I’m reading this book called “State of Paradise” by Laura van den Berg. She’s an amazing short story writer.