Brittany Newell’s San Francisco is a city charged with magic and mania where every person on the steep, foggy, moonlit streets is one kiss, one thrust, one slap away from bridging the education gap, wealth gap, or any other gap they’re interested in filling. In her second novel, Soft Core, semi-single twenty-seven-year-old Ruth – eager to assume the shape of whatever container can hold her – transforms into Baby when she’s dancing at the strip club, Miss Sunday in the dungeon, and, between shifts, thumbs through a rolodex of her life’s intimacies trying to articulate for herself the shapes and textures of her many longings. She lives in a Victorian in the outer Mission with her ex-boyfriend, Dino, a dealer known for his grade-A ketamine. When Dino disappears, Ruth, unable to involve the authorities, is gripped by a languorous urgency to throw herself into work while she waits for a sign. The city is as full of distractions as it is clues – exes materialize in strange places just as quickly as lovers disappear, doppelgangers begin frequent familiar bars and streetcorners, the dogs need to be walked – and, without an anchor, Ruth’s finds herself drawn deeper into some of her clients’ fantasies. Newell’s electric prose follows the pulses and rhythms of boozy drug-fueled nights interspersed with flashes of post-nut clarity while Ruth/Baby parses out the real from the fantasy in the world she navigates.
Brittany and I caught up with each other shortly before her launch party, a fun intersection between her writing life, her sex work, and the San Francisco party scene. We discussed, as artists often do, love and poetry, but also touched on dungeon etiquette and manifested casting Saoirse Ronan, and Bad Bunny, and Adam Sandler in the Soft Core film.
Stephen Patrick Bell
The first thing that jumped out of this book was Ruth’s voice. Your prose has a seductive way of setting a tone before plunging into these lush sequences that sort of pulse with a kinetic energy, firmly guiding the reader along. It is easy to get swept up and follow Ruth wherever she goes. And she goes a lot of places – San Francisco feels like a character in the book, a mercurial one that frequently contradicts themselves as they shift between night and day. Is Soft Core a story you could have told anywhere else?
Brittany Newell
Definitely not! I think of San Francisco as a main character in the book, exactly like you say. The book is about all the different sorts of intimacies that fill up Ruth’s life, from easily recognizable relationships like her romance with Dino to her intensely emotional and sometimes libidinal friendships with Mazzy and Ophelia. Also, the intimacies that are harder to name but just as impactful, i.e. her intimacies with different johns. All this is to say, a hugely intimate relationship in her life is the relationship she has with San Francisco, especially as she wanders around in her unraveling fugue state and revisits all the different places where special things have happened to her…Grace Cathedral, China Beach, the bus where she met Dino…She traces the city like you might trace a lover’s sleeping face. Early readers pointed out that the book seemed to be in conversation with 90’s erotic thrillers where San Francisco is figured as this seedy, shapeshifty city full of mystery and crime…I love that comparison! I really wanted the book to feel atmospheric and sensuous, to the point that the reader could smell San Francisco-at-night, feel the fog, be seduced by the city as I’ve been. It’s trendy right now to set lit-fic novels in this blandly dystopian tech-ravaged version of SF, like SF as an extension of Silicon Valley. That really yanks my chain. San Francisco is a city with a long history of deviance, a city where people historically came to bottom out, and moreover it’s a city I find impossibly enchanting, flaws and all, which makes it so much fun to write about.
Stephen Patrick Bell
You paint vivid, lush, and beautifully grotesque images that are wired into the senses, particularly smell. What was the first element of Soft Core that felt real to you – that made you realize you had a novel on your hands?
Brittany Newell
What an interesting question! I knew I wanted to find a way to document my dungeon stories so the only plot point I planned in advance was that eventually Ruth would end up working at Dream House….but on a more sensory level, writing the descriptions of the stripper’s outfits in the early chapters was the first thing that made the whole world of the book come alive to me. Moreover, it felt so FUN—hands down Soft Core was the most fun and emergent and exhilarating writing experience I’ve ever had. I’d sit down in my armchair (I never write at a desk, it hurts my stomach lol) and I’d let myself be seduced (back to seduction again!) by the colors and vibes and sounds of the novel as it came together. I knew early on that the book would be overwhelmingly purple, if that makes sense, and a bit smoky. And a bit glittery but not too much. Writing about the dancer’s bikinis and stockings and lipsticks and shoes helped me home in on the synesthetic qualities of the world.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Okay, so, I’m curious: did Ruth wind up where you expected her to when you started this book? Or did arriving at and departing from the dungeon shape her story?
Brittany Newell
Not at all! I suppose I knew she and Dino would reunite by the end, but I think there’s still a question of whether or not she’s “ready” to do love right this time around. The one idea that guided the writing of the book was this misty question of “what if we could fall in love all over again!?” Obviously inspired by my own waning relationship at the time, it seemed like such a painful and impossible dream, to return to those heady, perfect beginning stages of love, before the rifts and the wounds and the slow realization that you may never really know your beloved….Beyond that, as I said, the experience of writing this book was totally emergent and I’d enter that hallowed writerly flow state every afternoon when I sat down in my armchair, no drafting or plotting in advance…in early drafts, I only hinted at [major plot spoiler redacted], but once I spoke with my agent Annie and her assistant Mary-Alice about ways for the plot to climax in a more satisfying way, it was suddenly painfully obvious to me that something extreme and violent needed to happen to “complete” [Ruth’s] journey towards learning about her own lovability and opening her heart toward a potential reconciliation with Dino.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Which dungeon stories were hardest to work into the novel? The easiest?
Brittany Newell
Well, to be completely honest, I didn’t make a single dungeon story up. Every dungeon tale is thinly veiled nonfiction! And there were way more that ended up being edited out… the most fun Domme story to write into the book was probably the one where Ruth goes to Rudolf the Nudist’s hoarder Victorian.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Speaking of dungeon stories. A lot of Ruth’s work seems to revolve around setting expectations with clients. What are some basic rules of etiquette you’d suggest a curious reader to follow for their first dungeon visit?
Brittany Newell
For first timers, I always recommend setting up a roleplay. It helps one relax into the setting and give in to the fantasy. It also very easily and clearly establishes the power dynamic between you and the pro-domme, which is not to be challenged. Easy roleplays include Teacher/student, Boss/wayward employee, Sleazy Agent/aspiring pop star, Famous Actress/obsessive super fan… Other basic etiquette rules would be to arrive freshly showered and right on time, not early. Most dungeons are hidden in plain sight in nice neighborhoods so arriving early will just lead to you lingering on the doorstep and potentially blowing up the spot. Lastly, $100 cash tip is the norm <3
Stephen Patrick Bell
Are Soft Core and [your first novel,] Oola siblings?
Brittany Newell
Ha! Maybe estranged siblings. I was 20 when I wrote Oola so it feels like a distant fever dream. Although I will say, you can’t outrun yourself and I’ve had to accept that I’m always writing about the same handful of themes: longing, obsession, loneliness, D/s dynamics, the intermittent pleasure and torment of embodiment. I found an old zine I made with some friends in high school and realized I was hacking away at those same ideas even then; quoting Lana Del Rey and writing oddly graphic poetry.
In some ways Soft Core feels like my first real novel, as a more fully-formed person who’s had her heart broken in informative ways, but I can imagine Leif (the main character in Oola, a writer with an obsessive streak) going to Ruth’s strip club and falling in love with Emeline. I also tend to write male characters with a penchant for cross-dressing (both Leif and Dino don women’s clothes, though for very different reasons); which is perhaps just a failing on my part when it comes to maintaining the boundaries between fiction and autofiction! 😉 I’ve always loved that line from Prince’s song “when you were mine, I used to let you wear all my clothes…”
Stephen Patrick Bell
It doesn’t surprise me to hear poetry is part of your toolkit. Soft Core is full of lush sequences that expand and contract like muscles, the mechanisms of constriction and release are a part of the prose. Are there any specific poets that you felt yourself writing towards while you worked on this book?
Brittany Newell
Now is the time that I confess to being a numbskull when it comes to poetry with a capital P! I would say for me some of the most defining poets have been Leonard Cohen and Lana Del Rey… every so often I’ll flip through an Anne Sexton book to give myself the productive shivers. I’m more so inspired by fiction writers with poetic voices, who have playful rapturous specific styles, like Brontez Purnell, Lorrie Moore, Chris Kraus, Leslie Jamison…
Stephen Patrick Bell
You mention having your heart broken in informative ways. Ruth mentions that poverty – both material and romantic – can teach us about longing. What lessons about yourself did you get from writing this book? What are some of the lessons you think readers might take from Soft Core?
Brittany Newell
Hmm…. ask my SLAA group! I’m not sure if I think about books in terms of lessons, but rather in terms of colors and feelings. I suppose over the course of writing I discovered that I’m more of a diehard romantic than I realized, when I thought I was forever heartbroken and jaded and guarded. Readers might, at the very least, understand San Francisco on a more visceral level, and have a more accurate sense of the psychic toll but also many joys of sex work.
Stephen Patrick Bell
How do you usually talk about Ruth? I’ve been calling her Ruth because that’s how she’s introduced to us, but over the course of the novel she becomes Baby and assumes a number of slippery identities as she navigates the relationships she’s engaged in. How did you think about approaching a character that presents as different people in different contexts?
Brittany Newell
What an interesting question! I call her Ruth. I guess I’ve never questioned the slipperiness of her identity, which actually leads me to reflect on your earlier question about any family similarities between my first book Oola and Soft Core; Leif is also a shapeshifter, someone with an unstable sense-of-self and a codependent desire to mesh with his beloveds, so maybe these are the types of people I find myself attracted to literarily…porous, seeking, hungry.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Ruth’s understanding of the psychology of performance and projection influences her transitions from Ruth to Baby and back again. What performance elements from your sex work inform the way you present in your writing career?
Brittany Newell
I love the chance to combine my two worlds of nightlife and literature by throwing parties to celebrate my book release. Just merging those two crowds is such a rare and exciting pleasure for me! At my release party at The Stud, my friend Rel is making custom limited-edition panties with SOFT CORE stitched on them and my friend Josh Cheon of Dark Entries Records is going to DJ after me and Brontez read, so I hope it’s a wild time befitting of Ruth and her nocturnal ramblings.
Stephen Patrick Bell
The mental effects of Ruth’s sex work parallel a lot of what one might see in mental health practitioners in clinical settings. I’m thinking compassion fatigue, vicarious traumatization, and burnout mostly. What are some interventions you might have suggested to keep her from unspooling so catastrophically? (Maybe we don’t always want to read books about responsible people taking great care of themselves – where’s the drama? – but I found myself hoping Ruth got some help from someone in her community.)
Brittany Newell
That’s sweet of you to wonder! Hmmm…I think a large part of Ruth’s romantic dynamic with Dino was him taking care of her, him sort of reining her in, balancing out her impulsivity with his Daddyish stability. In truth, I’d love to get Ruth into a SLAA group specifically for other sex workers. I’m a little obsessed with SLAA these days because of the new book I’m working on, which follows a San Francisco-based cam girl and “love anorexic” (a SLAA term for people who intentionally deprive themselves of romantic nutrients) as she untangles from a toxic relationship with an emotional vampire and attempts to heal by forming a friendship with a cannibal fetishist. It’s all about consumption, excess, appetite…I digress! Ruth needed to lean on her friendship with Ophelia, which I think was very nurturing and healing, and spend more time under the covers at home with the doggies <3
Stephen Patrick Bell
You have such a singular and palpable vision of San Francisco that I can’t help but wonder… Are there any directors you’d love to see adapt Soft Core?
Brittany Newell
Well, MUBI optioned the rights and I’m working on a screenplay adaptation, so I’m not sure yet about directors but I do have crazy visions of Saoirse Ronan as Ruth and Bad Bunny as Dino and someone totally insane like Adam Sandler as Simon.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Going back to smell for a moment, I just loved how certain characters had specific smells. I was wondering if you could talk about some of the works or authors Soft Core might be speaking to and what you think they smell like.
Brittany Newell
Thank you! Bill Clegg commented on an early manuscript saying he’d never read so many different descriptions for how bodies smell! I am, unsurprisingly, a long-time Mary Gaitskill fan-girly, and I’d imagine she smells like clove cigarettes smoked in the snow whilst wearing heavy leather gloves with one finger missing. As for Soft Core’s tonal similarities to sleazy 90’s erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct, I’d say all the femme fatales of those movies smell like expensive lipstick, dive bar floors, and a touch of rose…and maybe like tights that’ve been worn 3x in a row….
Stephen Patrick Bell
What input did you have on the cover? The decontextualized pink folds and gloved hand make such a very specific image they’re almost abstract again. Who do you picture checking this book out at the library or plucking this book off the display at their local independent bookstore?
Brittany Newell
I had a lot of input on the cover, I was very specific about the cover needing to be pink, I sent reference images of 90s drugstore romance novels and Tom of Finland cartoons (I love the texture of the leather daddies’ shiny leather boots) which the designer captured perfectly in the nearly touchable quality of the glove on the cover! I hope my book finds its way into the hands of precocious gay teens, love addicts, drama queens, gentle perverts, anyone who’s wept to “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus, readers who enjoy vibe > plot, and all those who are prone to wandering at night. As they say: the girls that get it get it!
FICTION
Soft Core
By Brittany Newell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published February 4, 2025
