An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work

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 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 "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 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, 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.