Over the last few years, bodily autonomy has experienced a radically different fate onscreen and in the fangs of the American legal system. Roe V. Wade has fallen. “The right to not be pregnant,” as writer Charlotte Shane has called it, is no longer the law of the land. Meanwhile, recent movies like Poor Things and Zola sensationalize the sex industry rather than parse the nuance of the actual labor. Too often, films like these only reference sex work to titillate viewers instead of questioning their relation to the power of spectacle.
Shane’s new memoir An Honest Woman, out Aug. 13, is valuable counterprogramming. In writing the book—her third—she set out to detangle how we construct, sell, and perform intimacy. Over the course of its 191 pages, the author recounts the two decades she sold sex, focusing closely on a recurring client who blurred the line between professional and personal.
When Shane started sex work in the Bush years, “there was a constant stream of sex worker memoirs.” “Though a lot of the books of that era were incredible,” she remembers, “there was ultimately too much of the same thing—collections of anecdotes that either didn't go anywhere or wrapped up too neatly into ‘sex work is good’ or ‘sex work is bad.’”
With An Honest Woman, Shane brings the occupation out of morality limbo and back down to earth—it’s a form of labor like any other, sometimes fulfilling, sometimes painful, often banal. From sitting in silence with a client struggling to make small talk to the intense bodily maintenance required, there’s a lot of downtime. Beginning with her early forays into camming in college, we follow Shane as she shifts to in-person work and develops quasi-emotional relationships with her male clients—until a handsome suitor comes along and sweeps her off her feet.
Through spare prose and dazzling reflections on Britney Spears and the troubles of girlhood, Shane breaks down the tidy dichotomy of the personal and political. The cool, even-handedness that carries the memoir has its roots in a deeper spiritual inquiry. Shane recently started a popular beehiiv discussing the influence of Buddhism in her daily life—a theme that has informed her buzzy essays in n+1, Bookforum, and The New York Review of Books that tackle everything from Medicaid to abortion. There’s a steadiness that guides Shane’s writing, like talking to your wisest friend about life, love, politics, and God. “My biggest hope for An Honest Woman,” Shane recently wrote on her blog, “the hope that fueled its creation, is that it will inspire its readers to love more thoughtfully, to love better.”
The lyrical influence of Buddhist thinkers like Thich Nhat Hanh permeates the memoir, although Shane says, “I wasn't consciously trying to channel that tradition, except to the extent that I tried to be as honest and precise as I could about the relationships and emotions.” It is a book you can hold in your palm, flipping through chapters with sutras like “penises flopping like the tongues of panting dogs.” Here, a dick’s curvature and the buildup of sweat on broad shoulders are landscapes for meditation—and reinvention. “I love emotional rollercoasters,” Shane shares. “A crescendo of poignancy followed by a reset followed by another wallop; one ending feeding into a beginning feeding into another ending.” An Honest Woman might give rise to a finale of her own.
“I've regurgitated and forgotten most of my crazy stories by now so the well is running dry,” she admits. “With An Honest Woman, I think I've finally said everything I ever wanted or needed to say about [sex work.]”
