Over the course of about 18 months, in 2014-2015, a high class escort sent out a series of emails over Tiny Letter, in which she discussed her work, boyfriend, love affairs, and friends. The bulk of those emails have now been assembled together and published for the first time as a memoir.
This book is one of a growing number of reasons why I’m so grateful to Emily Books: although I don’t always love (or sometimes even like) their choices, I can’t deny I’m being constantly exposed to new things. A sex worker memoir is not a sub-genre I’ve ever felt much interest in (memoirs generally, for that matter, rarely attract me). And yet I loved this book. It’s astonishingly good.
Whatever I say next, I’m going to feel a measure of guilt about sex worker preconceptions. I know, theoretically, that not all of them turn to prostitution out of desperation; that their levels of education must vary; that some of them must consciously choose that line of work for reasons that elude me. But even knowing all those things, I was not prepared for the narrator of this book (pseudonym Charlotte): educated at a graduate level, not just well-read but also interestingly-read, intensely self-reflective, and glitteringly wealthy. (As evidence of the last, close to the beginning of the book she reveals that she has turned down an offer to work exclusively for one client at a salary of half a million US dollars per year.)
Charlotte has a long-time boyfriend, but their relationship is not exclusive. The main driving force of the narrative is her desire to rediscover what sex means for her outside of work. She meets men through Tinder and Craigslist, then pores over their encounters with soul-searching intensity, trying to understand what effect a decade of her profession has had on the way she interacts with men in her private capacity. She has, for example, difficulty distinguishing innocent flirtation or self-hype from intentional deceit, and constantly questions whether she can allow herself to trust particular individuals. Physically, sexually, she has to re-learn how to assert herself, how to tell someone not to do something she doesn’t like. Meanwhile, her relationship with her boyfriend, though professedly loving, seems to an outside observer to be suffering from a number of fatal flaws.
On a number of occasions when reading this book, I did question whether it was a hoax. Surely no-one’s life is naturally structured so novelistically? I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but for a book that started out in epistolary form, it has a definite rise-fall-rise to it, spread over four acts and shaped as though intentionally sculpted. The main thing that makes me believe it might be real is that the ending is imperfect, to an extent unresolved.
Memoir or novel, though, this is a marvelous read, a compulsive page-turner with subject-matter I had no idea I would become so wrapped up in. A large part of what I kept coming back for was Charlotte herself. Her voice is unique, her observations incisive and brutally honest. A lovely, unexpected book.
Trigger warning: drug use. Also obviously contains a lot of explicit sex.