‘It’s probably going to ruin me, isn’t it?’ Author Jennifer Belle on her shocking ‘Lolita in reverse’ novel

The American author became the darling of the 1990s US literary scene with her daring debut ‘Going Down’, about a call girl college student. Now, after a break of 14 years, she talks to Nick Duerden about cancel culture in the publishing industry, her experience of working with Madonna, and why she wrote her ‘outrageous’ new novel, about a consensual sexual relationship between a 14-year-old girl and a 38-year-old man

Author Jennifer Belle: ‘Madonna was creative and brilliant’ (Supplied)

Jennifer Belle was once one of America’s most lauded new authors. She was barely 28 when, in 1996, her debut novel, Going Down, about a woman who puts herself through college by working as a call girl, was published to global success. New York’s glitziest young writers Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz lined up to praise her, while Madonna snapped up the film rights, enlisting Belle to pen the screenplay herself. This daughter of the noted poet Jill Hoffman had got off to a dream start.

“Madonna was creative and brilliant,” says Belle. “She’d make suggestions for the screenplay, and I would disagree completely, but then I’d suddenly sit up a few days later and think, ‘Oh, of course! She’s 100 per cent right.’ It’s like she had tentacles all over her body, and just did things correctly, which is what an artist has to do.”

Their collective efforts, however, ultimately came to nothing. The film never got made.