Translator’s note:

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