The Violent Truths of ‘Brutalities’

“When I was twenty I got my entire back tattooed, the first pain I paid cash for,” writes  early in her startling new memoir, . The book can be tough to stomach. It is studded with scenes of spectacular, often heart-rending, violence, of which Steines accrued a seemingly inexhaustible store in the 15-odd years she spent working as dungeon, and then running a livestock farm in rural upstate New York State with an abusive long-term boyfriend. “Coked-out middle-aged bankers” come to the dungeon asking the 17-year-old Steines to “beat [them] bloody with a rattan cane,” and she obliges. She, too, discovers a dissociative form of ecstasy in sexualized pain, and enters a long-term relationship with a broody Brooklyn artist-metalworker who leaves her “splattered with quickly blackening bruises,” “a clicking jawbone,” and “thin red stripes across my ass and thighs.” On the farm, she learns to “slice into the spare haunches of a spring lamb with a