Melissa, an English dominatrix, has just lost her mother. But she has also promised to fly to Massachusetts to play the cane-happy headmistress of a girls’ boarding school in a film funded by a wealthy benefactor—and to give a keynote address on birching bare bottoms at a spanking conference in Texas four weeks later. And so, laid low by loss but also caught up in her obligations to colleagues, kinksters, family and creditors, she and her work husband learn to face grief, fear, and American highways while whacking backsides, cavorting with sex workers and visiting the homes of her literary heroes all down the East coast.

Stormy Daniels meets Bill Bryson in acclaimed author and world-famous sex worker Melissa Todd’s utterly unpredictable tale of cockroach-ridden apartments, fetishes that you never knew existed and profound personal failings. Tortured by the absence of tea but enchanted by American supermarkets, she sees some of the best and worst that the United States has to offer as she works her way from Halloween in Salem to the midterm elections in Jackson, Mississippi, indulging the strange sexual tastes of all-comers (for a price) and impressing the locals with her accent, vocabulary, and incompetence. Everything and everyone come to a climax—over and over again—at Houston’s riotous Lone Star Spanking Party, where Melissa bestrides the stage as a pornographic superstar while trying to stay alive on leftovers and clawing her way back towards at least some sort of financial and emotional stability.