I was taking care of a neighbor’s cat and while hanging out I found a true crime book on her bookshelf called “Perfect Victim,” about the kidnapping of a young woman, Carol Smith, in 1977. She was picked up by a couple while hitchhiking and ended up being bound, gagged, blindfolded, with her head locked inside a specially-constructed wooden box that the man, Cameron Hooker, had built in hopes of finding a girl he could kidnap and enslave. She was kept by this guy and his wife for the next seven years, being used as his sex slave and suffering all kinds of horrible abuse, and spending much of the time locked in a sealed wooden box underneath their bed.

So I was petting the cat and reading the book, and found myself feeling horrified by it and also really turned on. I always feel guilty getting turned on by stories of horrible kidnappings and crimes that actually happened to someone. This was a real person who suffered terrible terrible things. And yet I was totally drawn into it. There were descriptions of how he restrained her and locked her up that really got to me. I read for about the next hour and half, like I was obsessed, turning the pages and skipping forward to “the good parts.” The reality was awful but I found myself reading it like it was a fantasy. I don’t know whether to feel bad about that or not.