Vanessa Duriès, also known as Katia Lamara, was born in 1972. On 13 December 1993 she died in a car crash in the South of France. She was twenty-one. Three other people died in the same crash. She left two books centered on BDSM and a lasting cult status in parts of the SM world: a writer who put her own adult experience as a slave on the page, and who did not live long enough to age out of that story.
Le lien, and the stir it caused
Her best-known book is Le lien, published in English as The Ties That Bind. It is widely taken as drawn from her own experience as an adult BDSM slave. On release it caused a stir in France because she was young and beautiful. She appeared on national television, including Bernard Pivot’s show, and the May 1993 French edition of Penthouse ran a pictorial and an interview. That exposure, plus the slave narrative she did not soften, put the book in a narrow place between mass-market erotica and a literary record of how a slave identity sits next to ordinary young-adult life.
L’Étudiante, unfinished, set in Bordeaux
Her second novel, L’Étudiante, was written in 1993 and came out only fourteen years after her death. It is also cast as autobiography. It sets her extreme sexuality beside ordinary student life in Bordeaux. The students in the book are adults. She is clear and blunt about BDSM scenes, and she watches and mocks the quieter love lives of her fellow students. Those ordinary lives still fascinate her, and they push her toward a sharp reading of the SM milieu. Between chapters two and three the book inserts a short letter she wrote to her editor, Franck Spengler. The letter keeps that editorial closeness in the text after she was gone.
The 2007 editions
In 2007 five chapters of the unfinished L’Étudiante were published in France. A J’ai Lu edition that year carries an avant-propos by the editor Franck Spengler and a preface by Florence Dugas. It is dedicated to Vanessa Duriès, Nathalie Perreau, Jean-Pierre Imbrohoris, and their son, all killed on 13 December 1993. Spengler was also Perreau’s editor, and a friend of Imbrohoris. In 2007 Éditions Blanche issued Le lien and L’Étudiante together in one volume. The cover uses a photograph from her French Penthouse pictorial, so the magazine fame was recycled as book packaging years after the crash. English readers meet the first novel as The Ties That Bind from Masquerade Books, ISBN 1-56333-688-X. French readers keep Le lien in the J’ai lu line, ISBN 2-290-30700-9. Two titles: one finished, one a fragment.
