I've ordered Belle de Jour's book and it should be here soon, yay!
Am intrigued by her writing, but I think she's real.
what does everyone else think?

hi i have read both books and it is difficult to say whether or not she is real i would say though that i would like to meet her not to participate in some of her sexual encounters she has had with men but to just sit and talk to her about her life experiences i think she would be a great insight and definatly great to listern to.my wife read the books after me and she says she must be one hell of a woman for some of the things she let the blokes do to her she did say to me she might be up for a try at some of them though.

Never heard of her! This is an English site. Please enlighten me.

Belle de Jour is the pen-name of an alleged real-life 'high class' London call girl who started out as a blog (weblog/online journal) writer.

What grabbed my attention, was that she won the Guardian Blog of the Year for 2004, so I thought it would be a wry look at the sex industry, with maybe enough professional detail to keep people entertained, a vehicle for interesting comment on the society we live in etc etc.

Unfortunately, it's rather disappointing. She makes a few interesting points at the beginning about the lack of (interesting) graduate employment in this country, the post-uni north-to-south the exodus to find a job which lands graduates in sales, admin or as new media 'corporate whores' (I did agree with her on that, I can't stand it when people who are earning a massive salary bandy about this concept of 'corporate whoring' after having studied for years for their degree. If they're that bothered about who they work for/ethics/having to wear a suit to work, why on earth did they take it?).

Her style is good, in parts, a bit student-media in others, but is not what I presume is selling the book, I think that's more than obvious. She can sometimes be entertaining, sometimes even amusing, but rather a lot of the book concerns the ins and outs of her personal life and verges on the boring. I suppose to write a blog like that in the first place, you must be reasonably self-obsessed. Why people think the world wants to read their drivellings about how crap their boss is I don't know. There are some interesting blogs, which comment on interesting things, but this wasn't one of them.

She has maintained her anonymity throughout, there was a bit of a media storm last year, various newspapers speculating who had/hadn't written it, various real journos denying it, various people getting fed up with the whole things and sick of Belle de Jour. however, enough people believed the hype to put it on the Times bestseller list when it finally came out in January.

Hats off to her for getting a book deal though. I bought it more because she's an example of a graduate who is now doing what she wanted to do in the first place, writing, even though she did enter it by the back door (haha).