Translator’s note:
Although it was not reported in
the Mainstream Press, while the future President of France was being removed
from an Air France flight at a New York airport, a young woman who I will call “Ms. Dominique” was being arrested in the
lobby of a five-star luxury hotel and she was later held for several weeks at
Rikers Island, the notoriously filthy prison in New York. Undaunted by this
ordeal, Dominique began to write her spiritual autobiography, which explains
exactly how she came to be in this situation. Because she didn’t have paper or
pen, Ms. Dominique wrote this memoir on the backside of a young Ukrainian
prostitute using mascara and a set of “Lee’s Press-On Nails.” As Dr. Johnson
once quipped, this is a memoir that was “writ small”—or at least on the small
of someone’s back–something like a tramp-stamp, but with far better spelling
and less dignity.
Granted this document
hardly compares with Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” or
with John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” or with Johnnie Cash’s “Folsum Prison
Blues” or even Oscar Wilde’s “Dating Aristocrats, For Dummies”–but this
memoir still reveals the deep emotional insights of the young lady and her slow
emergence into spiritual enlightenment over a period of several months, leading
up to her arrest. Few people know that “Ms. Dominique” is a magazine writer and
performance artist whose work has been admired on five continents and three
uninhabited islands.
It is my hope that readers will walk into a bookstore and stumble over this
book where it sits on the “Remaindered” table. I hope they read the back cover
and publisher’s blurbs, and maybe even admire the lovely cover design and the
author’s picture—and hopefully you will find all the spiritual truth you need
by simply purchasing this book. But please, please, for your own sake, don’t
actually read the book. This pill should be labeled “Not for Internal Use.”
—EWL
