It is impossible not to be astonished at the narrative power and sharp intelligence of Nell Kimball, the woman who wrote Memoirs of a Madame American. And we say woman because she was not a writer ... she was a whore. Of this book, Roberto Calasso, who published it in Italy: "The philosophy of the brothel is a book that Nell Kimball could have written with excellent results, but he has not written, perhaps by discretion, having preferred to lavish the treasures of his experience in More accessible form of these Memoirs, which also provide a precise notion of that philosophy: the brothel appears as a closed world and in its full form, where sex has only the rank of honor - a sumptuous bed - and around we find, The various poufs, also the other Vices, in a dialogue without hostile prejudices even with some Virtues. "The sex of which Kimball speaks is not, however, the" pure fantasy "of pornographic novels or the equivalent, of the mojigatas and sentimental novels: it is a concrete reality, deeply known, experienced and understood, told without hiding anything , With professional obstinacy, and also observed with that sense of distance that only the great narrators have ".