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 rigorous and compulsively readable memoir (New York magazine) exploring what it means to be a heterosexual woman and a feminist in a misogynistic society.

A memoir of sex work that is also a poignant love story The Washington Post

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 unsparing honestly (The New York Times Book Review) and her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at a 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, An Honest Woman is a merciless and moving love letter to 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 the New York Times and New York Magazine/ Vulture's Most Anticipated Books of 2024
One of Esquire's Best Memoirs of 2024

"Shanes writing has an exposing, unmediated style what makes Shane a more adept interpreter of gendered suffering and sexual autonomy than many of her contemporaries is her attunement to both the mechanics of the body and the ruses of the psyche. She catches glimpses of what is otherwise obscured, deferred, and distorted, and this gives her work a watchful and self-reliant quality that glides against the current of much millennial-feminist thought."The New Yorker

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

Nothing short of revolutionary. The book works valiantly to tell a story about sex without a patina of faux glamour or obligatory trauma porn; to reduceAn Honest Womanto online clickbait is to miss whats really there and to be worse off for it.Emma Specter,Vogue

[Shanes] writing is spare but never reductive; her sentences snap, but never show off. . .Her strengths as a writer are all on display in this bookshes frank, funny, fearsomely smartbut what I appreciate most is her ability to slice straight to the heart of a matter with unerring aim, sparing no one (including herself).Nicole Chung,Esquire

Shanes unsparing honesty illuminates what it means for her to seek love, intimacy and relationships with these men under a cloud of misogyny.New York Times Book Review

A memoir of sex work that is also a poignant love story. A corrective to incurious narratives in which sex work is assumed to be nothing but an unrelenting debasement. In less than 200 pages, the book manages to be part autobiography, part anthropological investigation and part feminist tract but centrally, it is a eulogy for Roger, who was Shanes client for nearly a decade.Becca Rothfield,Washington Post

In compulsively readable, confessional prose, Shane probes her own experiences with desire, being desired, and the desire to be desired. She exposes the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy infect every union.Bustle

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

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.San Francisco Chronicle

An Honest Womanfulfills its promise as a memoir about love, lust, and laborbut its also a meditation on what it means to truly care for and try to understand each other despite oppressive social and cultural forces.Dirt

Through spare prose and dazzling reflections onBritney Spearsand the troubles of girlhood, Shane breaks down the tidy dichotomy of the personal and political.Cultured

Shane seems to be an honest woman, bringing a sense of principled curiosity to the page regardless of her subject matter. Her memoir... is in many ways a love letter to men. It is an inquiry into desirability and an earnest examination of heterosexuality.Interview Magazine

WithAn 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 ofPlaying the Whore: The Work of Sex Workand staff writer atThe 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 ofDetransition, 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 ofAll This Could Be Different

Author Bio

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