An Honest Woman
A Memoir of Love and Sex Work
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 13 Aug 2024
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- £11.99
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- Pre-Order
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
Through the lens of her years spent as a sex worker, Charlotte Shane offers a provocative and tender reckoning of what it means to be a heterosexual woman and a feminist in a misogynistic society.
In her early twenties, Charlotte Shane quit her women’s studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results.
Shane uses her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions. As she takes stock of her relationships—with clients, with her father, with friends, with married men, and later, with her own husband—she tells a candid and haunting tale of love, marriage, and (in)fidelity, as seen through the eyes of the perpetual “other woman.”
Braiding the personal and the universal, Shane’s memoir is a merciless and moving love letter to straight men and an indictment of habitual dishonesty, a condemnation of every social constraint acting on heterosexual unions, and a hopeful affirmation of the possibility for true connection between men and women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Shane follows Prostitute Laundry with more stimulating dispatches from the front lines of the sex industry. Dividing the collection into seven sections, Shane recounts her sexual awakening, subsequent introduction to sex work, and relationship with Roger, a longtime client who died of a brain tumor at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. She deliberately scrambles the timelines, juxtaposing anecdotes about coming-of-age at the center of an all-male friend group with accounts of jobs that mirrored the lessons she learned about male desire from those adolescent experiences. Flanking the more narrative passages are ruminations on the ironies of client/escort relationships, Freudian breakdowns of Shane's relationship with her father ("When I was sixteen, my father demanded two pieces of information from me: my status as a virgin and my status as a lesbian"), and sharp examinations of the prostitute's symbolic power as opposed to that of the "civilian woman." Refreshingly, Shane depicts the good of sex work (its liberatory potential, for example) as thoroughly as the bad (its occasional reinforcement of patriarchal structures). This slim volume packs a punch.
