Roman a Clef -- Let's do Lunch

People always like romans a clef -- you know, novels about famous people with the names changed. Because everybody likes to get an inside view of the rich and the famous.

But the concept has come to have a different spin for me since a set of conversations I had with some old friends from where I used to work -- call it BiFi, for Big Important Financial Institution.

As day jobs went, I pretty much liked working at BiFi. The pay was ok, the benefits excellent, the management fair-minded, and my fellow workers smart, literate, and supportive of my writing. I still go to lunch with groups of BiFi and ex-BiFi folks once in a while.

And so, about a year ago, I went to a luncheon and told Sarah, who's also retired, that I was writing full time now. She was really excited about it and so I gave her the URL to my web page. A few months later at the next luncheon, Sarah sat down next to me and told me that she and her book group (some members of which still worked at BiFi) had read my book.

"Great," I said. "Which one?"

She looked at me as though I shouldn't even have to guess. "Oh, Carrie's Story, of course."

Of course. The one I wrote (as Molly Weatherfield) with whips, chains, ponygirls, slave auctions, and equal-opportunity wall-to-wall kinky sex. The one where I dreamed up a motormouth twenty-year-old bike messenger to play out a lifetime of my inmost fantasies.

Who wouldn't chose Carrie's Story? Especially among the people I thought I had a basic business casual workplace relationship with.

Appalled and abashed, I hid my face in my tortellini, but my curiosity finally got the better of my befuddlement.

"So, Sarah, what did you and the group think of Carrie's Story?"

"Well," she said, "we liked it ok, but we were really mostly interested in how you know all that stuff, like where they have the slave auctions."

Right. I've heard this before. I've tried to explain that everybody who has that kind of fantasy life pretty much comes up with the same details. I don't understand why, but it's been true ever since the Marquis de Sade invented Sodality of the Friends of Crime, in Juliette. For some reason, the idea of a secret society, based on excesses of unequal power, really ups the fantasy.

I often like to speculate why this is true, but I wasn't going to get any help from Sarah.

"See, it's a fantasy," I said. "A shared fantasy. Kind of a sociological thing. You know, it's really interesting how..."

Sarah winked at me. Nodded. And winked and nodded again.

I tried to explain again and she interrupted me. "But it must be a true story," she said, "because there was this movie that Stanley Kubrick made, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman..."

Right, Eyes Wide Shut. Because everybody knows that if something is in a movie it's gotta be a true story. Especially if they used CGI to hype the orgy scenes.

"So what we really did," Sarah said, "during our book group meeting, was try to guess who Carrie really is, among the people who work at BiFi, you know. And we think we've got it narrowed down..."

And I have to confess to you that I was afraid to find out who they thought Carrie at BiFi was.

Just call it a compliment to my story-telling and world-building skills. I guess.

Gulp. Wink. Nod. Gulp again. Because none of you readers out there would ever make such assumptions, would you?

And for you other writers of hot-and-heavy stuff out there, has anything like this ever happened to you?