Before OnlyFans, before (imagine!) Instagram, before PornHub and Girls Gone Wild, two paradigmatic bad girls—a teenage runaway turned exotic dancer and a juvenile delinquent turned lovelorn junkie—found love in the dressing room of a strip club in 1970s California. Set between the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Valley of the Dolls (as in: the San Fernando), Lovers XXX, Allie Rowbottom’s second novel, follows aspiring artists Jude and Winnie as their first jobs at a strip club spiral into roles in the burgeoning pornography industry. What began as a girl writhing behind glass, yearning to be writing it all down, ends as the novel we are reading now, with a meta-twist: It is also, maybe, the novel that girl began many years ago.
Rowbottom is no stranger to the feminine objectification industrial complex. Her first novel, Aesthetica, follows an almost fatally lonely Instagram influencer in pursuit of an experimental plastic surgery that promises to reverse all her previous cosmetic work. Rowbottom also used to write an advice column answering women’s questions about beauty—treating inquiries often mocked as superficial as the wrenching existential provocations they were.
Whether writing about fictional influencers, her complicated relationship to cosmetic interventions, or ambivalent porn stars, Rowbottom is a stylist, a surgeon, a cinematographer, and a mirror. She refuses simple morality tales and the purity traps feminist writing is too often subjected to. Rather than indict another woman for pick-me behavior, Rowbottom asks why her decision was the most profitable or least perilous option, revealing the structural forces that drove her to it.
This book arrives at a moment when women on screen are attempting to wield old structures in ostensibly liberatory ways, too often to tragic effect—from Industry’s Yasmin Ghislaine Maxwell-maxxing to Euphoria’s Cassie and Maddie girlbossily founding a queasily exploitative OnlyFans sorority house. But as Winnie observes near the end of Lovers XXX, with “each technological shift, each new outlet for selling sex and women’s bodies, a new crop of people got rich, most of them men.” Rowbottom’s work transforms tools of oppression not into further grist for the misogynistic mill, but modes of inquiry that might throw a wrench into it.
A few days after her novel hit shelves, Rowbottom and I met up in Central Park to discuss chasing highs, searching for our own standards of beauty, surviving feminist feuds, motherhood, and more.
This novel is a hyper-contemporary period piece—a paradoxical achievement, like most feminist feats. Why set it in these two moments, just before the pivot to VHS in the ’80s pornography industry and the pivot to OnlyFans in the 2010s?
At a baseline, I wanted to write something different than Aesthetica: I wanted to write in a time period where there were no iPhones. At the same time, that technological shift from film to VHS was full of conflict, similar to the peak Instagram moment—everything’s coming to a head, so that naturally compelled me as a fiction writer. I’m so compelled by the technological shift from internet streaming to OnlyFans and creator-led content, but it made sense to end it just before that, because that moment needs its own treatment.
Both your novels investigate performativity as an element of feminized identity construction. In Lovers XX, Winnie imagines herself “as if she was a character in a story written by a man” even when doing mundane tasks like opening a can of soup. In Aesthetica, your protagonist experiences a parallel phenomenon, but through the lens of an internalized Instagram filter rather than the pornographic camera.
That was a moment drawn from times in my younger life. For example, I would just be taking a shower and it would feel like I was in a shampoo commercial. Girls grow up so inundated by images of women’s bodies doing quotidian things through the lens of the male gaze, it’s impossible not to internalize that perspective. As crazy as image culture is now, as constantly bombarded as we are with images of women’s bodies, it’s not new. Writing Aesthetica, I spent time poking around Instagram and thinking, Holy shit, this is an exploded, macro version of Seventeen magazine, of everything I lived as a young person growing up—what would it be like to have dealt with that times 10? Going back in time was kind of like taking my foot off the gas a bit and asking, What would it be like to live with this minus five, but then add two for the fact that they’re in the porn industry?
In this novel, you describe the “junkie’s curse” as a constant “toggl[ing] between love and selfishness.” In that moment, your narrator is referring to heroin, but I wonder whether your characters relate to femininity and self-objectification in the same vein?
I have a bit of an addictive personality. When I was these characters’ ages, there was certainly some substance-hopping going on, but I have also had that addictive relationship with self-objectification. In eating disorder recovery, the constant refrain is, You can’t just stop eating. You can’t quit cold turkey. That’s what it feels like in some ways to be a woman in a body in 2026: It’s hard to cold turkey opt out of self-objectification unless you’re going to move off the grid.
Your writing always delicately renders that state of constant negotiation, and the subsequent ways women invent their own beauty standards, which live in our minds alongside patriarchal ones. How did writing about the porn industry allow you a new way into that struggle, one you couldn’t access in your novel about influencer culture?
Adult performers in the ’70s and ’80s would often perform in wigs and costumes. There was an element of disguise because people did have spouses or other lives, and it was easier to compartmentalize because we didn’t have the Internet. There is a strain of self-defense that comes from masking through makeup or fashion. Ultimately, my hope is that these characters find true beauty through each other, and through moments when no man is watching, which also feels very true to my lived experience.
You are also so adept at portraying transcendent female friendships, even as our connections are artificially encouraged, systematically sabotaged, and rhetorically undermined by patriarchal structures. So many so-called “female friendship” stories reify simplified, archetypal dichotomies by pitting characters against each other, whereas you seem more interested in revealing the misogynistic structures that encourage those readings.
I have a vested interest in bypassing any kind of moralizing. I think it’s an easy way out to have one character observing the other make mistakes, passing judgment, and allowing the reader a vessel through which to absorb, internalize, and adopt the writer’s judgment. In my close friendships, a lot of the time I’m the person who’s making morally questionable decisions—getting plastic surgery, for example—and my female friends have to react to that. Obviously, I judge myself harshly, but it gives me that nuanced perspective.
This book engages with second wave feminist writers like Andrea Dworkin, whose grand provocations, I think, are often misunderstood as proclamations—taken literally when they were meant to incite argument. What were you interested in pulling out of that moment, which was so rife with controversial manifesto-style writing?
In my research phase, reading about the Women Against Pornography movement, when Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon were making these grand proclamations or provocations—I think more the latter. In feminist circles, these hardline stances can get people talking, and they can be useful. But it’s very hard to live a totalizing theory. Those second wave figures were so strident about all heterosexual sex being rape, for example, but then you hear [famous adult actress] Linda Lovelace say, “They paraded me around on tour and then didn’t pay me or support me in any way.” I thought, That’s just that’s fucking classic. As with hard line feminist stances against plastic surgery, I fundamentally agree with a lot of the points, and then I also feel that when it comes time to leave the book and go out into the world, everything changes.
Women’s books are so often siloed into limiting categories: female friendship books, self-flagellating memoirs, etc. When Winnie leaves the porn industry to become a writer, she runs into just those kinds of publishing roadblocks. What were you hoping to convey about today’s publishing landscape for women writers?
It’s a still developing answer. At this point in my career, having published three books, the most important thing to me is having executed a vision without considering the marketplace. With Aesthetica, I started that book thinking, I’m going to write something that is really going to sell. And it did sell, but it wasn’t an easy sell to publishers. I want to write things that are challenging and morally gray. I anticipated that people would push back against the subject matter of this book, so with Winnie’s writing career post-porn, I wanted to bake in that meta-commentary to say, “This might feel more palatable to you if it was a true crime novel or a porn star’s memoir,” with her in a dress and heels on the cover feeling remorseful for her life’s work. I’m nodding to the fact that I know that that’s what the industry might want and I’m not going to do that.
When we meet the older version of her, Winnie has written a book, and she has not had a baby. One of many lines that stayed with me from her section of the novel is “A book, like a baby, solved nothing.” That felt like a subtle indictment of many lies women are raised on, and I wonder whether you were implying that there’s another solution, or perhaps that our desire to use the word “solve” when considering our life stories is the problem?
Something I’ve come to in my life, which is baked into Winnie’s section, is the realization that I’m not going to become a mother. Taking the sentimental aspects and the cultural pressure out of it, I have tried to think through the reality of what having a baby would do to my life, career, and relationship. Is that something I still want, given all those factors? And the answer was no. It’s another one of those myths sold to women and it does behoove us to think beyond that.
Both your novels involve plots predicated on the characters spending time in online forums: here, ones for fans of disappeared pornographic actresses, and in Aesthetica, forums like RealSelf, where people compare plastic surgeons and advise on medspas. What is it about these disembodied spaces that intrigues you, as someone who writes so much about the tension so many women feel between embodiment and objectification?
I encountered a lot of those forums when I was researching. I would look for adult performers from that era and they would have had a whole separate life—you could find someone through the forum, and then find them on Facebook, and it turns out that they’re a pediatrician now. Forums like RealSelf are spaces similar to plastic surgeons’ offices, where they’re staffed by women, and there is this sense of, Nobody is going to call you a bad feminist or tell you you’re selfish, we’re all in it together and we’re all just trying to survive in this system. Given that, let’s help each other find the best person to do our boobs. It’s highly problematic and also deeply comforting and calming, even if it’s a complete illusion.
At one point in this novel, one character discovers another doing a massive quantity of cocaine in a hot tub. She asks her friend, “‘Are you crazy? Your heart could break.” She meant literally—she was afraid her friend might have a heart attack—but I’m curious whether that moment functions as an existential logline for a lot of your work? You write protagonists who could be called crazy, who gamble with their own and each other’s hearts and seek to clarify their desire through risk.
Even though this is definitely my least autobiographical work, it’s been my life’s work to get to know my desire, to try and oftentimes fail to separate it from the cultural conditions in which I’ve lived. I have been drawn to extremity to figure that out: Let’s do all the coke and see if that’s what I want. [Laughs] But there are spaces that I haven’t pushed into in my own life, and I let my characters do that for me. In a world that so carefully polices what women desire, you do have to really punch through to break out—that crazy woman celebrity cultural archetype, in order to escape she had to go hard, and sometimes she flamed out in the process.
What are you finding overrated and underrated these days?
I’ll be controversial, so keep in mind that these are my own shoulder chips: Babies are overrated and caring for animals is underrated.
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