An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work

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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 womens 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 relationshipswith clients, with her father, with friends, with married men, and later, with her own husbandshe 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, Shanes 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

One of New York Magazine/ Vulture's Most Anticipated Books of 2024

A rigorous and compulsively readable memoir about her career as a sex worker and the possibilities of romantic love between men and women. Shane excavates her relationships with her father and the boys she grew up with, measuring the harm of inherited lessons about sex and the value of girls hotness against the power and freedom sex work later afforded her. This personal and professional investigation resonates and entices. New York Magazine

Astute in her social critiques, the author demonstrates her intuitive understanding of how people can build more fulfilling relationships with one another.... It's funny, authentic, and unequivocally honest. A graceful and candid look into sex, intimacy, misogyny, and identity. Kirkus

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.Publishers Weekly

Shane is an erudite writer, funny and disarming, and her memoir holds space
for all of the dualities of love and sex work. Booklist

With An Honest Woman, Charlotte Shane's already-formidable clarity and grace as a critic and essayist are here turned so honestly, so ruthlessly to an examination of womanhoodof how women make ourselves known to ourselves and to each other under patriarchy. She is one of the very, very few writers I want to read writing about our lives with straight men. MELISSA GIRA GRANT, author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and staff writer at The New Republic

The first book Ive burned through in a single sitting in months. Elegant, candid, merciless and movingits an experience to make a reader reconsider how love works.TORREY PETERS, author of Detransition, Baby

I'm in love with Charlotte Shane's writing here, full as it is of clarity, earned beauty, and a deep intelligence at once cerebral and embodied, tender and brutal. I inhaled this book. SARAH THANKAM MATTHEWS, author of All This Could Be Different

Author Bio

Charlotte Shane is a nonfiction author and essayist. She is the author of Prostitute Laundry and N.B., both published by TigerBee Press, which she cofounded in 2015. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Bookforum, Harpers, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere.