In our post- Fifty Shades of Grey world, you might wonder why Keenan needs 300 pages to explain a spanking fetish. In this unusual memoir, one obsession informs the other like a metaphor, where the known-in this case, 14 of Shakespeare’s best loved plays-explains the unknown.

Keenan is “obsessed with spanking,” to use her own words, and she is also obsessed with Shakespeare. Iambic pentameter matters a lot to Jillian Keenan, whose new memoir Sex with Shakespearespins a story of reading and readership, like Phyllis Rose’s The Year of Reading Proust or Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, but with something specific in mind: using Shakespeare to explore her relationship with her sexuality. You can’t not know it iambs are the poetry of your lover’s blood, your mother’s blood, and of your own. Even if you don’t know your trochee from your spondee, you know an iamb. It’s a heartbeat, but it’s also a very specific rhythm-it’s iambic pentameter, the metrical foot made famous by William Shakespeare. Put your head on your lover’s chest and you will hear ba- bump, ba- bump, ba- bump. Sex with Shakespeare: Here's Much to Do with Pain, but More with Love' target='_blank'>Sex with ShakespeareĪs always, you can find us by heading over to and be sure to follow us on Facebook (/schoolofpsych) and Twitter website: jilliannyc.The Taming of the Shrew performed at Shakespeare in the Park, 1960. On today’s episode, Jillian shares her experiences and struggles with growing up kinky, how a classic children’s book became her surprising first ‘startle’, her love of language, and her passionate plea to the mental health community to understand the number one most damaging thing they’ve gotten wrong about kink and spanking all along.Īs always, you can find us by heading over to and be sure to follow us on Facebook (/schoolofpsych) and Twitter website: Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Slate, The Atlantic, Scientific American and many other top media outlets. As a foreign correspondent, she’s reported from Somalia, Niger, Khazakstan, Burundi, Bosnia, and more. Jillian is a freelance journalist based in New York. Her new book Sex with Shakespeare is a deeply intelligent, exciting, and moving memoir about her own search for love and sexual identity as well as a provocative re-examination of sexuality throughout the Shakespeare canon.

Jillian Keenan is obsessed with Shakespeare…and spanking.

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