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A Year On Earth With Mr. Hell is an erotic memoir written by Young Kim which has been steadily building buzz over the past couple years, leading to a feature in The New York Times that was published over the weekend. The book details Kim’s sexual experiences with the punk icon Richard Hell, who she first met in 2015 when he was presented with the Malcolm McLaren Award at a ceremony in New York. Kim was romantic partners with McLaren, another notable punk figure, for the last decade of his life (he died in 2010) and serves as the executor of his estate.
A Year On Earth With Mr. Hell details the four sexual encounters she had with Hell after that initial meeting, which took place over the course of ten or so months. In the book, Kim said that the idea for the memoir developed after Hell prompted her to “write a few lines about what we’d done together sexually.” “I’d never written anything dirty in my life, but I was willing to try,” she wrote in the book’s introduction. “I sent it, and he loved it, just as I had loved writing it.”
But the relationship did not last beyond those handful of meetings, and Richard Hell does not approve of the finished product. In a statement to the Times, Hell described the book as “revenge porn,” and went on to say:
How would you feel if you dated someone briefly, including having sex, and it turned out that they were writing about it behind your back and eventually published that misbegotten, uncomprehending — but full of false detail — account of the affair, with a focus on the sex, using your real name?
Kim defended her work, responding: “In writing this book I have only done what men have done unapologetically (and I do not think they should apologize) since time immemorial: choose my work over my relationship.”