Nine and a Half Weeks (book)

First edition (1978)

Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair is a 1978 novel by Ingeborg Day, first published under the nom de plume Elizabeth McNeill. It details the brief, sexually violent relationship between an art gallery owner and a Wall Street broker–based on Day's own experiences. The memoir was famously adapted into the 1986 erotic drama 9½ Weeks, starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.

Synopsis

The memoir is set in New York City. An art gallery owner enters a nine-week affair with a brutal, brutish, sadomasochistic Wall Street broker who regularly sexually abuses her in his apartment for amusement and pleasure. Unable to say no and sinking into complicity, the woman finds herself enjoying the beginning of the affair. Eventually, the relationship culminates in criminality, depravity and violence when he convinces her to rob a man at knifepoint in an elevator and forces her into having sex with someone else while he watches.

The woman is forced to make a choice between her life and sanity or a mentally impoverished man incapable of feeling love, but who has manipulated her to love him. He often leaves her tied up, in immense pain, in his opulent apartment for hours at a time.

The memoir ends after her nervous breakdown when he leaves her at a mental hospital. After undergoing therapy that lasts for months, she never sees him again.

Reception and legacy

The novel caused a scandal when published. Day committed suicide at the age of 70 in 2011.

In a 2012 New Yorker article, Sarah Weinman writes "Nine and a Half Weeks is a potent antidote to what passes for erotica today. Instead of over-the-top fictional fantasy, McNeill’s book, presented as memoir, is charged as much by explicitness as it is by absence. The reader is only privy to her perspective, and even then, it’s occluded by the use of a pseudonym".