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An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"A graceful and candid look into sex, intimacy, misogyny, and identity."
"Shane is compelled by the numinous attraction that pulls her toward sexual partners, and the unguarded tenderness that certain clients feel toward her."
"This slim volume packs a punch."
"Shane is an erudite writer, funny and disarming, and her memoir holds space for all of the dualities of love and sex work."
"Yes, it's a racy, salacious tell-all at times, but it's also a refreshingly candid and provocative think piece — one that questions the blurry boundaries of attachment when it comes to pleasure, the complicated nature of intimacy, and the murkiness of feelings surrounding who and how we love."
"A strange and poignant love story."
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