BRITISH IMPORT.(Zoe Margolis)

In late 2003, Zoe Margolis read her first blog, Belle de Jour, which purports to be the diary of a London call girl. "She wrote about her working life of sex for money, and that wasn't my story," Margolis said the other day. "But I realized that there were all these thoughts and feelings I had about female sexuality that I never saw expressed anywhere else." So Margolis started her own blog, which she named Girl with a One-Track Mind: Diary of a Sex Fiend.

Margolis, who is thirty-four, was born and brought up in London, and is an aspiring filmmaker. Most recently, she was an assistant director on "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," which will be released this summer. Her friends and colleagues knew nothing of the blog. "Since there was the shield of anonymity, I thought I could say anything. I wrote things I wouldn't tell my best friend," she said. The blog's voice--cheerfully neurotic, unapologetically political--was distinctive from the start. Regarding one memorable romp, the Girl mused, "Here was I, a feminist, a believer of equality in every realm, and a man wanted me to take all the control? I wasn't quite sure about that." (She gets sure.)

Margolis was soon drawing ten thousand visitors a day. In the summer of 2005, an agent suggested that the Girl turn her stories into a book. Working through intermediaries and a trusted lawyer, Margolis signed a contract that would, she thought, allow for publication of the book while keeping her anonymity intact. As a nom de plume, she chose Abby Lee.

Last August, a few days after "Girl with a One-Track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door" was published, her doorbell in London rang. "There was a guy with a bunch of flowers for me," she said. "To sign for them, he made me kneel out the front door in a very awkward way. It was just strange." The next day, she learned that the flower delivery had been a ruse, concocted by the Sunday Times, to take her photograph for ...