I Am Jennie
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4.0 • 83 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A strikingly honest and disarming memoir from an ex-porn star and reality television personality who describes her descent into addiction to sex, drugs, and alcohol—and her ultimate path toward recovery.
Drunk and high, holed up in a hotel room with a beautiful blonde she barely knew, Jennie Ketcham was thirty-six hours away from entering rehab. Her on-camera alter ego, Penny Flame, was a rising star. Her personal life, however, had been getting worse for years and finally hit an all-time low.
After her parents’ divorce, she lost her virginity at thirteen and began a game of initiating boys her age into manhood. For the fleeting moments she spent in bed with them, she got to be the center of attention. Eventually, Jennie found porn—that enticing world of immediate gratification, endless drugs, and seemingly endless money—and became Penny Flame. Divorced from her feelings, tempted into a lifestyle she couldn’t afford, financially or emotionally, she entered Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew to boost her career. But when Dr. Drew and his staff insisted she appear using her real name, the once indestructible walls she had built around herself began to burn down.
Jennie candidly recounts her struggles: confusing sex with self-worth, addiction with love, detachment with strength. Ultimately, I Am Jennie is a tale of a woman who considers herself a work in progress but who finally understands that the only person she can truly afford to be is herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A self-excoriating, fairly raunchy memoir from a former porn star recounts her struggle to come clean and change her life, despite the powerful lure of money, sex, and drugs. Known in the adult entertainment industry as Penny Flame since she was a college freshman at San Diego State University, Ketcham entered the Pasadena Recovery Center in 2009 as part of the motley celebrity crew for the reality TV show Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, where she went by her real name for 19 days and found the experience excruciating but transformative. While "Penny was not a real person and could disappear," she writes with a smarting frankness, "Jennie could be stalked, captured, and hurt, all very easily." Her bits in recovery alternate with chapters that delineate very explicitly how she gradually moved from taking off her clothes for photo shoots for, among others, Hustler and Cher to girl-on-girl sex scenes and the hardcore boy-girl videos that brought porn-star recognition and raked in money for her, promptly spent on drugs and a fancy car. Lying to the men in her life became an enormous problem, and Ketcham reaches back to her memories of childhood growing up in the California suburbs with divorced parents and a heavy-drinking mom to trace patterns of promiscuity brought on by intimacy issues. Directing her own movies for one of the porn outfits, Shane's World, helped her gain a sense of autonomy. Ketcham's unflinching, clear-eyed desire to be "a normal girl with realistic dreams" rings with a vulnerable poignancy.
Customer Reviews
Excellent.
Couldn't put it down. Amazing transformation in the author. This book inspired me to start reading again. I gave it up at 13 & I am now 32. It used to be a passion of mine and this sparked it for me again. Thank you Jennie and congrats to you on your continued journey...
Amazing
This book is an I ncredibly honest and detailed account of someone who made their mistakes, realized them and then completely turned their life around. Jenny does a superb jobjob of describing her entire life in a way that is funny and thoroughly detailed. She not only explains her emotions throughout all the pitfalls and successes in her life, she has a way of also accounting for how the people she encountered throughout her life felt. Jenny is an exceptional writer, especially for her very first book. While you read this book you feel like you’re actually there with her. She is incredibly detailed and sometimes gritty, but it makes for telling a complete and utterly honest story. This book is also written in a way that takes leaps in time from her childhood, to her rehab days, back to when she first started in the porn industry, back to when she was a teenager, all the while giving readers not only an insight into the industry, but also answers all the reasons why she made the choices she did. Jenny is a survivor and a warrior. I truly hope she writes more books even if they are fictional, she truly has a gift in storytelling and writing.
Talk about naked!!
The exciting thing about this read isn't the fact that Penny gets naked, it's that Jennie allows us to see her naked in the figurative. The honesty is both an intriguing and exciting read. Jennie shows that anybody truly can be whatever they want whenever they want.