While working at a large, midwestern university, Isabella Synan holed up in her office trying to make sense of what spurs an educated, successful woman to give up freedom and become the willing sex slave of a complicated man, and what might cause her to leave again. The resulting novel attracted a NYC agent who tried, without success, to find a publisher for her book. The time’s not right, he said. Thirty years later, when he was about to retire, he found the manuscript again and tracked down Isabella. Once again, he could not find a publisher, and attributed it to the #Me Too movement squelching women’s willingness to spare any sympathy for the Harvey Weinsteins of the world or the Bernard Barenbaums of fiction. Meanwhile, Isabella decided to go the Indie route and publish the novel herself.
The author is drawn to dark internal landscapes that, paradoxically, illumine our humanity: how we behave behind locked doors, the behavior we don’t talk about, even to closest friends, and the ways that the most respectable among us develop to cope with emotional traumas and unspeakable acts that marked our childhoods and shaped our sexual desires. Isabella’s family warned: “If you don’t stop writing about misogynistic sex hounds, or trying to make pedophiles sympathetic, you’re going to have the FBI at your door.”
Isabella grapples with questions that lead directly to the underbelly of our lives: How does a strong, independent woman navigate a world of men who rule by domination and control? What happens when a woman falls under the spell of a sexual partner who doesn’t play by the rules? What are the rules and the cultural mores that shape definitions of normal and perverse? It took five editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the moral gatekeeper of our sexual practices, to determine that alternative lifestyles, all variety of kink, and the restrained BDSM that’s practiced by millions in private, are legitimate topics of conversation in mainstream culture. They’ve always been fodder for juicy skin novels, dark romances, and embarrassing sub-genres like BDSM fiction, books you cover with the Arts or Business section of the newspaper when riding the subway.
But what happens when an author brings the uncomfortable conversation to the dinner table, or weaves it into a mainstream novel? Family and friends said, you’re writing what? Maybe we don’t want to know you. Enter Isabella Synan (a pen name borrowed the name from a distant relative who was more concerned with surviving the potato famine in Ireland than pondering how culture labels sexual behavior as kink or mainstream, benign or pathological, pleasure or harm). While fellow writers revel in the limelight, Isabella prefers the darkness, available only in the undercover of anonymity; but she welcomes readers' comments or discussion of any aspect of the book via her website.
Isabella not only set out to write a mainstream novel about what some may delicately call bad behavior, but she pushed boundaries to explore what happens when a relationship begins as an ordinary romance, progresses to sex toys and spankings, with both parties consenting, and then goes wildly out of control and crosses the line into cruelty and abuse, maybe even criminal behavior. The author played with the contradictions inherent in every relationship of power imbalance and took them to the extreme.
Unlike E.L. James’ young Christian Grey, who learned to control his emotions through his practice of BDSM, Isabella created Bernard Barenbaum, an older, more mature version of a lesser god who practices BDSM without limits or control. One might view him as quintessential male: the anti-Ubermensch. She created Margaret, who doesn’t understand why she wants to submit and surrender, as the archetype of women who want to please, embodying the ideal female partner who juggles servitude to her master with loyalties as a mother trying to keep her child safe. Isabella used a call and response style in the novel, where the daughter’s moral outrage, when reading chapters of her mother’s memoir after her death, is a kind of Greek chorus for mainstream society’s evolving consciousness about how humans play out power imbalance in socially entrenched gender roles.
Isabella’s bio includes writing credits for both fiction and scholarship. She chose not to continue her former respectable life as an academic, living off the letters after her name, but surrendered to the unpredictable and scary work of an author. It doesn’t pay the bills, but it beats her earlier jobs as a younger woman working in a fertilizer factory, at a painting company, and at the candy counter in Woolworth’s. While this first stand-alone novel marks the end of her fascination with controlling men, she’s still figuring out how to rear sons who prefer compassion and equality to power and domination, and daughters who love and are loved without submitting.
Her second novel, The Mothers, will be published in 2025.
“An often-engaging story of an unusual relationship and its effects on those around them...every chapter a new shock.”
– Kirkus Reviews
BOOK REVIEW
MY MOTHER AND THE ARTIST
BY Isabella Synan • POSTED ON Oct. 31, 2024
Synan presents a novel about the murky, complicated life of a 1980s sexual submissive.
In the present day, Alexandra Lizska is the CEO of a corporation that provides shelter for abused women in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s a skilled fundraiser, and she’s achieved success on her own without any support from friends or family and without a college degree. However, her world is upended when her estranged mother, Margaret, dies, leaving behind a lightly fictionalized memoir called Owned, which focuses on its main character’s relationship with a “big deal” real-life artist in New York named Bernard Barenbaum.As it turns out, Margaret was one of Bernard’s sexually submissive lovers in the ’80s; he even had her sign a “consensual contract.” During their time together, he carved a B onto her body with an X-Acto knife in a backyard ceremony. Bernard is the reason why Margaret and Alexandra (who’s called Amy in the fictionalized memoir) moved from Ohio to Brooklyn when Alexandra was a child. When Alexandra journeys to New York City as an adult to settle her late mother’s affairs, she begins reading the soon-to-be-published book. Her first impulse is to block its publication but, as it turns out, she has no legal power to do so. She continues reading and finds “every chapter a new shock,” and she finds out more details about Margaret and Bernard’s connection than she ever wanted to know. In addition, Alexandra finds out more about her own childhood in the story of “Amy.”
The novel captures the reader’s attention early with the very first mention of the term slave. As the details of Margaret’s voluntary servitude are revealed, it becomes apparent that she had few limits on what she was willing to do for Bernard—although she did have some, as in a scene in her book in which she was given the option to either go to a dungeon or participate in group sex. As Bernard tells her, “Both will happen eventually, but I’ll let you decide which you’d like next.” Such is his way of always explaining things, as if he has the right to command; the resulting tension between Bernard and Margaret enlivens the narrative. Somewhat less compelling is the story of the friendship that develops between Amy and Bernard’s adopted son, Daniel, the child of one of Bernard’s former lovers; he’s portrayed as a strange boy who takes pleasure in things such as keeping pet cockroaches. As he and Amy grow closer, he becomes determined to help her with a chronic kidney problem that’s plagued her all her life. This storyline makes for a pleasant contrast to the rest of the novel, but the structure of Synan’s work is such that there’s little suspense regarding the severity of Amy’s health problem—as, obviously, she grows up to become the successful Alexandra. The secrets revealed about Bernard, Margaret, and the bizarre ways of adults are of much greater interest throughout.
An often-engaging story of an unusual relationship and its effects on those around them.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
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