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The working title was Morality Play, which was a little more literal than where I ended up. At the center of the whole story is a game that Marian and Valentine play as children, trapped in this Victorian workhouse; it’s like cops and robbers, but they’re acting out their respective parents’ arrests, trying to reconcile ideas of right and wrong, of justice, with the unfair reality of their situation.
This struggle over right and wrong follows Marian into adulthood, where she must serve as lady’s maid in a house with a terrible master who tries to take advantage of her—and also confront her own dark, kinky desire for adult Valentine, when he’s hired as footman in the house.
I think On Good Authority is a pretty opaque title—even misleading, because we use the phrase for when we have reason to believe information is true. But I mean the phrase in the way that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre meant On Being and Nothingness: straightforwardly. This book is about what good authority looks like—especially in consensual BDSM--and...[read on]
Q&A with Briana Una McGuckin.
--Marshal Zeringue
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