I Am Jennie
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
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.
