“THERE ARE WORK KNICKERS, and there are Boyfriend knickers, and never the twain shall meet. Work knickers, I’ve learnt from experience, should be big.” Welcome to the web diary of Belle de Jour, 28-year-old graduate, compulsive lingerie shopper and, oh yes, prostitute. Belle has a chintz-filled flat somewhere in North London, a boyfriend who sends her sweetly loving text messages, and an ice-cool Eastern European madam who muddles the names of London hotels, leaving Belle scrambling to reach clients before their desire ebbs.
As of last month, she also has a book deal, one of a new wave of “bloggers” who are being scooped up by the publishing industry. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, who have bought Belle’s book in a rumoured six-figure deal, plan to launch her on us next Valentine’s Day.
The hope is that the same people who enjoyed Bridget Jones’s Diary and Mil Millington’s Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About (a spin-off from the author’s website) will lap up Belle’s humorous take on paid sex and handbag dilemmas, thus propelling her on to the bestseller lists.
But who is Belle? Does she really work as a prostitute or is she simply an ambitious writer who has worked out that blogging — writing a weblog — is the new way to secure a book deal? And real or not, do her adventures in the sex industry amount to a witty take on female empowerment or a sad reflection on the craven sexual behaviour of some young women post-Sex and the City? Warning: the content is, at times, explicit.
In fact, the only thing most people agree on is that Belle writes terribly well. When her diary first appeared on the internet last year — http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com — it quickly became a cult hit. It’s not difficult to see why. In many ways Belle takes on the mantle of Candace Bushnell, whose Sex and the City columns were, when first published in the New York Observer, equally shocking. Just as Bushnell dissected her dates, so Belle turns an anthropological eye on her clients. “I love English archetypes,” she enthuses after visiting a client at home in Chelsea. “Public schoolboy, thirties, MD of his father’s company. The sort of person who says ‘chin chin’ before a drink. Fan of Boris Johnson.” Then there’s the psychotherapist with the pristine flat. “I rang the bell of a building in Mayfair; no answer from the speaker — he buzzed me straight up. He opened the door of the flat and disappeared into the kitchen for a drink. Inside it was clean, almost sterile. Smoky glass mirrors everywhere — I was overwhelmed with the feeling of being in a restaurant.” But there are other similarities to Candace Bushnell: Belle often sounds terribly American, despite claiming at one point to have a Yorkshire accent. She is also rather boastful of her sexual exploits. Nothing disgusts her, nothing causes her pain (either emotional or physical) and nothing puts her off a cappuccino with friends. “Hear me, modern woman!” her columns trill.
As her fame has grown, so speculation about her true identity has grown. One of the wilder suggestions was that Belle de Jour might be the nom de plume of Toby Young, journalist and bestselling author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Belle’s retort appears in the Frequently Asked Questions section of her website. “Yes, I really am a call girl. A bored journalist could probably fake this blog but I’m not that clever. I wouldn’t say no to a ‘real’ writing career but lack the necessary perseverance.”
Actually, Belle seems to have been rather diligent in propelling herself to literary fame. Her fans would argue, of course, that it was sheer talent that rocketed her on to the blogging A-list — alongside the Wolverhampton writer Mil Millington, whose second novel, A Certain Chemistry, is about to be published, and Salam Pax, the gay Iraqi architect who managed to see the funny side of living in Baghdad during the run-up to war.
Just before Christmas Belle won a Guardian award for her blog, and began assiduously seeking a publishing deal. Among those who championed her was Millington, though he has never actually set eyes on her. “Met her? In person? What an excellent notion,” he writes to me via e-mail (bloggers seem allergic to telephones). “I can just see myself telling my girlfriend that I’m off down to London to have dinner with a call girl I met on the internet. They’ d have to spray down the walls with pressure jets to get the blood off. No, I know her only virtually.”
Mil put her in touch with a number of people in publishing, including Hannah Griffiths of Fabers, who has spoken to Belle but never met her. So, is she American? “I respect her decision to remain anonymous,” says Griffiths hurriedly.
Whether Belle will be able to preserve her anonymity as the publicity grows is another matter. Helen Garnons-Williams, her editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, originally spoke to Belle by phone. At that point Belle was in the process of choosing an agent, and had already met Patrick Walsh, who now represents her. He insisted that Garnons-Williams meet Belle in his office, not at the publishing house, and that she sign a confidentiality agreement. He also says he didn’t hold an auction for the book, precisely because it made it easier to keep Belle’s identity under wraps.
“I think we’re very conscious that it could be a bit of a red flag to the Rebekah Wades of this world,” he says, referring to the Editor of The Sun. “We’ve tried to select people to work with that we know we can trust. We did various things with bank accounts and so on to make sure that she can’t be tracked down.”
It all sounds like rather clever hype, but Walsh is adamant that Belle really will remain anonymous. “There have been certain books like Primary Colors and The Bride Stripped Bare where it was always part of the game plan that the name of the author should come out. Here, we’re just not interested in playing the guessing game. Further down the line she’ll do e-mail interviews and talk by phone, but she has family and friends she needs to protect.”
So what does Belle look like? “It was simply nice to see that she wasn’t Toby Young,” jokes her editor Helen Garnons-Williams, relating their first meeting.
So, where is she from? “It’s difficult to place her accent,” says Garnons-Williams, evasively. Is she beautiful? “She’s very attractive, very sexy.” As for her background, Belle claims in her blog to have a degree in humanities, though from which university she doesn’t specify. “She’s certainly phenomenally bright,” says her editor. “And she’s better read than I am. I think she was brought up in a house with books.” Would you ever guess she was a prostitute: “I’m 28, and she’s not that different from the people I know,” says Garnons-Williams.
That may be because she isn’t a hooker at all, but a metropolitan twentysomething in search of literary fame. “I know someone who has met her,” ventures Annie Blinkhorn, deputy editor of The Erotic Review, which now publishes a diary by Belle. “He said she was imparting highly technical information that you could only come by if it was bread and butter.”
Angel Zatorski, manager of the London women’s sex shop Sh!, was sceptical. “It didn’t sound terribly convincing to me,” she says. “It’s very flippant, and she’s able to separate herself off from what she does a little too much. If you were going out to sell your body I don’t think you’d be quite so sorted and confident.”
As for the idea that Belle is a liberated young woman in charge of her own sexuality, Zatorski doesn’t buy that notion at all. “I find the blog quite objectionable,” she says. “Why take the worst aspects of male sexuality and transpose them into the female arena? I think for a woman to become a kind of walking sex menu is a rather lowly aspiration — we can do better than that.”
But of course, sex sells, not only in the flesh, but in books. In America, it forms a miniature literary genre all of its own, with a glut of books a couple of years ago. There was Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, Lily Burana’s Strip City and David Henry Sterry’s Chicken, a memoir of his time as an LA gigolo. More recently there’s been a wave of sexual memoirs from Europe. The most recent is One Hundred Strokes of the Hairbrush by the “Sicilian Lolita” Melissa Panarello, an 18-year-old schoolgirl who describes her sexual escapades, beginning with the loss of her virginity at 15. Last year’s great sex read was The Sexual Life of Catherine M, by the promiscuous Parisian intellectual Catherine Millet.
But despite our appetite for the subject, there has been a dearth of British authors prepared to spill the beans. “I don’t think we have that exhibitionist trait in our culture,” suggests Nicholas Clee, editor of The Bookseller.
Is Belle de Jour really British? Is she a hooker? So long as her books fly off the shelves, no one in publishing is likely to complain.
Who the Belle is she?
She wears Chanel’s Le Vernis Beige nail varnish and her ideal man is Alan Davies.
