Just what is Comfort Food all about?!?

Comfort Food is the story of Emily Vargas, a well-educated minor celebrity on the self-help conference circuit, who is kidnapped and held captive for six long months. During this time, Emily’s captor, “Master,” refuses to speak to her, depriving her of the one thing she needs to maintain her grip on reality — human contact. Through sensory deprivation, isolation, punishment, cat and mouse games and other methods, Master subjects Emily to endless psychological torture that eventually blurs the lines for her between pleasure and pain, right and wrong, moral and amoral, consent and the lack thereof. Comfort Food is a fascinating and intelligently written book that is at once terrifying and compelling, makes your skin crawl and your heart flutter, disgusts you and turns you on.

You can read my complete, 5-book review of Comfort Food here.

Kitty answers some questions about Comfort Food…
 

I think part of what made me angry about Story of O was how impersonal it all was, and how Rene told O he loved her, but he still did all this stuff to her. Like I could have gone along with it if he hadn’t told her he loved her because I didn’t buy that he did. LOL. It’s a little too personal to talk about in detail to strangers, but Story of O pissed me off on a lot of levels for a lot of reasons, but I kept feeling like I had to read it again. Like there was stuff in there that I needed to read and deal with.

It wasn’t anything specific about the book itself that inspired Comfort Food, it was more my reaction to it. I wanted to write a book that inspired strong emotional reactions like that. Love or hate. Something that moved people and made them think. Maybe about their own internal journey. Maybe about their own kink. Whatever.

A couple of other books inspired Comfort Food in some ways… Nine and a Half Weeks by Elizabeth McNeil… That book bugged me because they go on this kinky journey, but then at the end it’s like the book makes this moral judgment and then instead of taking the characters where it’s natural for them to go, they make the “socially approved” choice and break them up. And I was like, WHAT??? So when I wrote Comfort Food, I thought, “Screw it. This isn’t going to be socially acceptable. I don’t care what the PC ending would be. The ending is going to be what makes sense for these characters.”

And the other book was a nonfiction book I’m rereading now called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne. Basically the book is about how people allow others to manipulate them and take away bits of their freedom… and that freedom is about living your life the way you want to live it. So everybody’s freedom isn’t created equal. Someone who is agoraphobic, for example, won’t find the wide open wilderness very freeing or comforting.

And Comfort Food deals a lot with this concept of freedom and social acceptability. And when do you make the decision to break off from what society says so you can have freedom as you define it? I think most of us allow ourselves to be enslaved to the opinions of others. To the extent that we do, we aren’t free. And for many of us, gaining our freedom is a lifelong process.

Well, as is probably obvious, I am not a feminist. While I don’t think every male is an alpha or every female is submissive, I do think most mammalian sexuality is drawn along lines of dominance and submission with male dominance and female submission being the statistical norm. And I don’t have some kind of social or personal problem with that.

Either way though, Comfort Food isn’t about “all women,” it’s about Emily and women like her.

Emily does show a lot of personal self-control and obvious decision-making. The hardest decision for her is letting herself submit to him. She has to convince herself that no one will blame her because she’s the victim. It’s more about what others will think. If she and Master were the only people who existed on the planet, I don’t think she would have gone through that struggle. She’s so scared of herself that she dissociates from part of it, not because she can’t handle it, but because she’s so terrified she can’t. So she gives form to those fears.

She makes several decisions to show obedience to a degree that is above and beyond what someone “just trying to survive” would do. But I can’t be specific without spoiling parts of the book for people who haven’t read it but might like to.

I don’t think I would defend Comfort Food and Emily’s journey. You either get it or you don’t. You either like it or you don’t. I knew going in that this definitely wasn’t right for everyone. I feel that the description and the disclaimer make it clear what you’re getting going into it. People who know it’s not their thing but read it anyway… that’s their issue, not mine. :)

Comfort Food was a hard book to write. It was very emotionally draining. I was going through a dark period when I wrote it as well. So… it was dark. LOL. It originally was meant to be lighter rape-fantasy fare. It wasn’t originally meant to go so deep psychologically. And probably many of my future books won’t be quite like this. A lot of the eroticism of this book is in the power exchange itself and not in specific overtly sexual acts or graphic sexual descriptions. The next book will likely break away a lot from this pattern.I wrote it pretty slowly but it wasn’t that hard to write… except emotionally. Like it wasn’t hard to plug into Emily’s thought processes… it was just hard to BE THERE. It was the experience that was hard, not making the words come out.

I have studied human behavior quite a bit. But I had a clinical psychologist (who is also a professional editor), beta read and edit the book. I was pretty sure that I had the psychology right because I’m kink-wired. I already know how many submissives think/feel. But, I wanted to make sure from an outside reader’s perspective that the psychology played right. The psychologist is a self-proclaimed “vanilla,” so it gave me more assurance that I hit all the right emotional points for realism.

I think it’s because it’s so psychological. I think you can read it and get something from it even if you aren’t specifically turned on by it. Some have found the book bothersome because it’s “eroticized.” But that’s sort of the point. It is noncon erotica… so I’m not sure what some people thought we were going to be eroticizing here.

The eroticism of the situation, combined with the psychology and level of reality, is what makes it “controversial” to begin with. Taking away the eroticism takes away the entire point of the book. A reader doesn’t have to be turned on by it, but they have to be willing to accept that Emily is turned on by it. If they can’t at least accept that part, then Comfort Food probably isn’t right for them.

I think the biggest effect on me has been that when you write a book like this you can’t write it without letting some of your own psychology be on display. I think one of the problems with a lot of kink-type books is that a lot of people write them because they’re “trendy” right now. It’s not necessarily something that’s in their own wiring. They may have the props and words right, but… the underlying psychology and feelings… they don’t understand that wiring, so they don’t get it. And there is something missing. Other people who are largely non-kink wired, who just want to be titillated by something a little “naughty,” won’t see what’s missing from the equation, but another person with that kind of internal wiring will.

When I was writing it I was telling myself I wouldn’t really publish it, it was just for me. It was really the only way I could get through it. If I’d thought for a second that someone else would read it, I think I would have censored myself too much. It’s not that it’s super graphic sexually, or that there is anything particularly “out there” about the sex that does happen. It’s the nakedness of the psychology.

But when I finished it… I let someone read it. And that person loved it. And so I let someone else read it, etc. And after enough positive reaction I knew I needed to put it out there. But, even then I assumed it would get mostly a negative reaction because a book like this just tends to piss people off. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how overall positive the response has been, and how many readers seem to deeply “get” what I was trying to convey.

Where can I get a copy of Comfort Food?

You can enter to win a FREE ELECTRONIC EDITION of Comfort Food by commenting on this interview post with a note as to why you think Comfort Food should be bumped to the top of your TBR list!

Comfort Food can also be purchased (for only $2.99!!!) at the following locations in electronic form (coming soon in hardcover and paperback editions):

• Scribd.
• Amazon
• Smashwords

What’s next for Kitty Thomas?

Kitty has been hard at work writing her second novel, Guilty Pleasures, which she hopes to release in electronic form before the end of the year. Guilty Pleasures will follow Comfort Food in the nonconsensual, dark erotica category and addresses the theme of “Which is worse: bad sex you consented to, or amazing sex you didn’t?” (Um… can I plead the Fifth?) The book has also been described by Kitty as a kind of “kinky magical realism.” She has been regularly feeding tiny teasers for Guilty Pleasures to followers of her blog, complete with tales of the captive Vivian and her “civilized monster” Anton. I, for one, can’t wait to read more!

You can follow Kitty, too!

• On her blog… http://kittythomas.wordpress.com
• On her website… http://www.kittythomas.com
• On Twitter… http://twitter.com/kitty_thomas