And she delivers. There are lots of lurid details of humiliating everyone from Wall Street power broker types to rabbis at Mistress X, a Midtown dungeon. It was hard work, both physically and mentally. As a newbie, she struggled to find the mot juste of insults. "Stop breathing on my legs, you crust of scum on a rat’s cunt!" barely makes a dent in the consciousness of the guy nuzzling her toes. Smacking someone’s bare ass cheeks for 15 minutes is exhausting. Better to tie him up and go have a smoke. All of the dildos, floggers, nipple clamps, enema bags, rope, syringes and paddles are fully catalogued here, as is the Catherine Wheel, the leather bed that doubles as a coffin, and the various dungeons—medical, school room, torture.

Eventually Febos tired of plowing hairy ass after hairy ass, saw that the power of the game did not reside with her and knew she had to quit the drugs. Her evolution keeps the memoir moving. She ably dissects her own and others’ psychological urges and sexual politics and presents it all in a way that renders the title apt. The memoir should be right at home next to Mary Karr, Nick Flynn and Alex Lemon on the bookshelf. What’s more, leaving the dungeon serves as a universal metaphor for emerging from subterranean urges.

We talk about the whole trajectory over lunch at Le Grainne Cafe in Chelsea. First we meet at her favorite dominatrix supply shop, Purple Passion. We check out the paddles and floggers, admire some corsets and a black latex dress she’d once owned. We wondered who could possibly accommodate the super-sized "Rascal," a chain of tennis ball-sized anal beads, which would have been better named the Velociraptor or the Wreckdom.

Starting in 1999 when she was 19, Febos cultivated and overcame a whopping heroin addiction, perfected her skills as "Mistress Justine," graduated from The New School with a 3.9 GPA, got an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and wrote and sold her memoir. The woman sets a blistering pace.

"I didn’t feel like things were happening quickly," Febos says. "But my nickname was ‘Crash’ when I was a kid. I was always bumping into things. Partly because I was always enraptured in fantasy, but it was also a symptom of moving incredibly quickly. People were always saying, ‘Slow down!’

Everything that happened during those 10 years had been in a long gestation. I’d started writing at six, started drugs at 11. By the time I came to New York, everything came to a head simultaneously."

The drugs and the domming shared a "common denominator," says Febos. "Both behaviors gave a momentary satisfaction of feeling in control and desirable and fulfilled. But it depleted me. It eroded my self-esteem. They were short cuts, and that deficit doesn’t disappear. You have to account for it at some point." Thanks to her recovery program, a bullshit-proof therapist and her own force of will, she’s done so.

These days she teaches creative writing at The Gotham Writers’ Workshop, NYU and SUNY Purchase College. Her former and current professions are "more similar than you would think," she says, laughing, even though on her blog she’s described herself now as a "college professor who hid her tattoos under pearl-buttoned cardigans."

Febos explains, "The similarities are that you have to perform, and the amount of energy that you bring is the amount of energy that’s returned. With teaching, it’s just amazing. There’s an element of self-forgetting, it’s one of the principle pleasures of it. I disappear into the act of it. In teaching it’s about disappearing into what I love and believe as opposed to a persona. But being a dominatrix pays better."

Despite the cash, she couldn’t see herself going back to being a domme. "Not now, not once I’ve lifted the veil. Not professionally at least." Besides she’s already sold the corsets, leather restraints, and paddles at an eBay store on Flatbush Avenue. "It was such a New York moment, especially with the non-reaction of the woman pricing the stuff. She said, ‘Let’s just call these house wares.’"

Whip Smart by Melissa Febos. Thomas Dunne Books, 288 pages, $24.99.

July 24, McNally Robinson Booksellers, 52 Prince St. (betw. Lafayette St & Mulberry Sts.), 212-274-1160; 7pm, free.

Or she could put it up for adoption. That’s what some artists are doing on the Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN), a New York-based website that has made the artwork of about 115 artists available to anyone who can prove that they’ll be a worthy “parent.” It’s leading to a very different sort of relationship between artist and art owner.

Commissioned by Art in General, FAAN (www.fineartadoption.net) was founded by artist Adam Simon, who is currently also working with the Williamsburg gallery artMoving Projects. Simon first conceptualized art adoption when he faced a storage problem with his own work. “It started me thinking about how much really good art is being either warehoused or destroyed and how many people there are that would love to own art but don’t because it costs too much,” he said.

As the website explains, FAAN “uses a gift economy to connect artists and potential collectors…This means acquiring artwork without purchasing it, through an arrangement between the artist and collector. Our goal is to help increase and diversify the population of art owners and to offer artists new means for engaging their audience.”

Organized according to genre, the types of work available run the gamut: paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, even installation pieces. Recent adoptions include “More Moonbeams,” by Carrie Waldman, a large, outdoor, acrylic on aluminum painting of the translucent undersides of yellow flowers on six 4 foot by 8 foot panels (the largest piece yet to be adopted); an untitled small painting by Amy Sillman of an array of concentric circles contained within muted red, yellow and green squares; and Heather Lowe’s “Silky,” a lenticular image of what looks like an undulating shiny scrim.

To adopt requires online registration (quick and free) and filling out an application, which asks for potential adopter’s background and interest in the piece. Applications are emailed to the artist, who then decides if the applicant gets the artwork. Currently over 330 people have signed up as adopters and approximately 75 adoptions have taken place. At times competition can get fierce—the most sought after work of art so far received 13 separate adoption attempts before finally going to the lucky new art recipient.

Lowe, who has put several pieces up for adoption in addition to “Silky,” has had only positive experiences. “I can deal directly with someone who is enchanted with my artwork,” she said. “No middleman. No gallery curation.”

No money either. But of course artists decide for themselves how much of their work they’re able to part with. And there are other potential concerns. Would artists feel their work would be devalued, in any sense, by giving it away? “The first artist that I sounded out about my idea said exactly that,” Simon said. “He emailed me recently to say that he had changed his mind and would love to participate. For an artist like Amy Sillman, whose work fetches high prices, it appears to be a non-issue.”

Janet Stafford, another artist on FAAN, deals with the issue of potential devaluation by assessing what, exactly, an artist is looking for from a transaction. “As we all want to sell our work, want a person to value it enough to pay for it…there is a bit of a conflict in voluntarily giving it away. However, most artists also just want appreciation for their work.”

The adoption process promotes that kind of appreciation. When I applied to adopt a piece of Stafford’s, an iris inkjet print made from an oil painting of a photograph of Mars’ surface, I wanted to tell her something about my immediate response to it. “It reminds me of something I read by Lawrence Weschler in his new book Everything That Rises,” I wrote. “In it he talks about Rothko’s work in the context of the moon landing and this painting evokes both.” Stafford responded the next day to say the piece was mine.

After I picked up “Mars,” which was beautifully framed and carefully wrapped in muslin, from Stafford’s Midtown studio, the transaction itself seemed like an extension of the artwork, or a separate piece. It was, as they say, a “moment.”

This was roughly how Simon described a number of adoptions for both sides of the deal. “The email exchanges that have been occurring between the artists and potential adopters have at times involved profound human interaction,” he said.

I did buy that piece from the Chelsea artist with the dogs, but meanwhile, it remains packed away—that short conversation a one-time thing. But as soon as I got “Mars” home, it went up on the wall and still evoked Rothko, the moon landing, Everything That Rises and course the red planet itself, but also several conversations with the artist, walking through Midtown from her studio and the art of generosity.

Now I’m thinking of saving up to buy some of the other pieces in the “Mars” series, but I don’t think Stafford will mind shifting to a more typical transaction. As she neatly put it, “There can be a bit of tension in the money/appreciation duality, but I don’t make a big deal out of it. I don’t see money as evil or corrupting! It’s just a sign, an indication.”