An Honest Woman is composed of six chapters that chart Shane’s time as a sex worker in D.C. and New York. The story begins, not with her first paid date, but her first encounter with Roger, one of her most loyal clients. Shane’s relationship with Roger structures the narrative, with each chapter anchored by her experiences with him. Following the tradition of other workplace memoirs, An Honest Woman keeps a tight focus on the work itself. She details her time with Roger but also many other clients. Despite actively writing and publishing during the same years covered in the memoir, Shane only briefly mentions her burgeoning career as an author. Likewise absent throughout the memoir are references to other books about sex work. Instead of commentary and critique, Shane gives us experience itself. A master of tone and narrative pacing, Shane lets us linger in her day-to-day, reveling in the joy and mundanity of her obsessions, loves, and work.
In An Honest Woman, meaning and pleasure come from love, and here, the possibilities for connection are endless. Fueled by genuine curiosity in the world, Shane reveals the power of non-romantic connections to shape us. One of the most defining relationships of Shane’s adult life is with Roger who is neither a lover, a friend, or family. Theirs is a relationship rooted in mutual respect, care, and curiosity—the hallmarks of any satisfying relationship, Shane seems to say. What’s more, satisfying relationships can manifest in many different ways, with all kinds of people, even animals. Shane treats all her relationships in An Honest Woman with care, from her husband to her sentences. This deep ethical commitment to care buoyed me as I read. I left An Honest Woman more awake to the world and the transformative possibilities of connection. Instead of a brutal confession, An Honest Woman offers readers something more potent than exposure: a close-up take of how care can look and feel in the many different kinds of relationships open to us. Is there a better gift a book can give?
Elizabeth Hall: The book can easily be read as a praise song to curiosity. Page after page, readers ride the crest of your cosmic interest in the world around you. Here, curiosity becomes a tool to help you connect, write, make money, and love deeply. With a memoir, you’re almost always writing about yourself as well as past events. You know the raw plot points before you begin. How did you continue to cultivate curiosity in the manuscript and yourself as a character through multiple drafts?
Charlotte Shane: Staying interested in the book was a colossal challenge. During the pandemic and 2020’s BLM protests, I realized there was no way I could write the book I’d sold on proposal. And I hope to never write a memoir or any book sold on proposal again! The only way I got through it was by realizing Roger should be the fulcrum. Looking back on the whole of our relationship gave me a new perspective that felt worth pursuing.
I really appreciated when the book zoomed in on your relationship with Roger after letting us see the broader tapestry of how you entered sex work. Because Roger was your client for several years, we see the way your relationship evolves over time as well as how the care you offer him shifts, particularly after he receives some devastating news. Throughout the book, the care you offer yourself and others seems rooted in a deep respect for the power of human connection itself, rather than romance or obligation. The Roger storyline not only gives the book its narrative skeleton but also its ethical core. Did you initially include narratives with other clients?
I didn’t. Roger was remarkable for reasons that I hope are made clear in the book. But I’ll mention one that might escape immediate notice: His eloquence and willingness to put his feelings into writing meant I was able to let him speak for himself. I wouldn’t have been able to do that as extensively with any other client. At the same time, he had a lot in common with other men who hired me: He was highly educated, mild-mannered, married, a father. So he was exemplary and archetypal. Then there is the crucial fact that my time with Roger constituted a cohesive and uncommon story.
I noticed a tendency among reviewers to describe your writing in An Honest Woman as “open,” “frank,” and “unflinching.” Your voice has always struck me as authentic and trustworthy, but I didn’t feel the book was unusually candid for a memoir, a genre built on personal revelation. As I read, I began to suspect that the impulse to spotlight the book’s honesty might have more to do with gendered expectations around autobiography and sex work. With both women memoirists and sex workers, it’s easy to assume we have more access to the “real truth” of their lives. But the self presented on the page or to the client is often a carefully constructed character. What was your selection process like for choosing which personal details to include, from grad school to marriage? How did historical and cultural assumptions of sex workers being “public women” who are both accessible and knowable influence your approach, if at all?
It’s funny you bring this up because I was also mystified by that. Aren’t memoirs predicated on disclosure? It shouldn’t be remarkable when one delivers on the promise. The repetition of this commentary became discouraging because (I felt) fixation on the confessional angle suggests there’s no value in the writing itself.
I believe most people who thank me for being “so open” or “so honest” mean it sincerely. But I also heard this from interviewers who asked disrespectful questions and betrayed a lot of biases in the course of our discussion, so I see disapproval and condescension inherent in it, however subconscious that may be. I think it also (usually) betrays tremendous ignorance about sex work. People by and large are not hearing sex workers speak about their work, I think that’s very clear. Nor have they been exposed to sex work’s various historical and cultural contexts. All they encounter is essentially state propaganda in support of extensive criminalization and surveillance, or radical feminist-inflected discourse rooted in antipathy.
I didn’t make many concessions in the book to a readership that was entirely ignorant about or hostile to sex work because that type of writing is tedious to me. At the same time, I imagined the book would reach a public who wasn’t very savvy and hadn’t read my previous writing, and I didn’t want them to be totally lost. I also felt aware of the book as a historical document because the circumstances within which I started escorting have been gone for years. Craigslist, Backpage, collectives of so-called “high end” escorts, vibrant message boards for clients and providers—they don’t exist anymore here. I always wanted to do an oral history of pre-recession sex work in the United States. It was a fascinating and exciting time that only a small group of people really know about.
I tried to make the book complete in the way a seed is complete, endowed with everything it needs to do its specific job—and not a single extraneous element. That’s why the book is so short. And like a seed, it’s meant to grow a single type of plant, not six different varieties. So there’s nothing about my brother, my mother, my exploitative boyfriend after college, etc. In earlier drafts, there was, but it diffused the focus too much.
In the book, there’s an interesting parallel narrative where you slowly realize your own ability to make your life happen. In the second chapter, you joyfully detail your teen years immersed in Boyland. Back then, boys represented freedom for you, “endless possibility.” They were the ones who “made things happen,” a “bizarre assumption” you didn’t shake until much later. Your understanding that you are in fact the event, the prime mover, blooms alongside your writing and sex work careers. In this way, An Honest Woman offers an alternative coming of age story where a creative practice carries the same weight as, say, a sexual awakening or major personal loss. Why was it important to you to include your experiences as a teenager?
The history of one’s sex life has to include puberty, I think, if only a paragraph or two. It’s the foundation for everything that comes after, whether you’re reacting against it or embracing it. And since the book is about heterosexuality specifically, I had to revisit the moment when my attraction to boys went into overdrive, and explain the sort of quintessentially me (lame, earnest, pragmatic) behavior patterns that resulted. It was also a fun time to write and dwell in. Memories of my teenage friends make me happy. That was true in high school and it’s been true after. I got really lucky with them.
I want to dial in on those “lame, earnest, and pragmatic” behavior patterns. Specifically, you write about these early sexual explorations as “practice,” something to “get out of the way,” if only to sidestep embarrassment. Like a true “library kid,” you believed “any task is surmountable if you study,” even fucking. For me, these passages were highly relatable. I kept thinking of Lena Dunham’s recent film SharpStick. Both the movie and your book peg a specific delusion shared by nerdy, millennial girls that they can avoid the possibility of humiliation, bewilderment, and unknown emotions that new sexual experiences carry through dispassionate in-the-field research. Why do you think so many in our particular generation found inexpertise around sex so intolerable? Perhaps it’s not generational at all.
Oh, I love this question and I think it’s very much tied to the 90s and 2000s being a time when overt (or perhaps more accurately, performative) sexual prowess was becoming de rigueur for white girls, largely because of what the internet did to and for porn, which was make it ubiquitous, free, and accessible to amateurs for creation and distribution on an unprecedented level. Though porn can’t and shouldn’t be siloed off from the rest of mainstream culture. Girls Gone Wild is a late 90s phenomenon, and most homes did not have access to the internet then. Howard Stern was a huge celebrity by the mid-90s. All of 1998 was about the president’s penis. American Pie came out in 1999. These are just top-of-mind examples. Hyper-sexualization was very much in the water, and in my social setting, it was shameful to be a virgin because it meant no one wanted to fuck you.
The general progression makes sense: First the sexual revolution ushers in the expectation that women sleep around, and that gives way to the expectation that women ought to be good in bed à la the Cosmo school of putting a donut on his dick or whatever—adventurous, well-versed, creative. I’ve never in my life felt the obligation to be able to cook anything, let alone something that tasted good. But from a pretty early age I believed it was indispensable for me to be able to deep throat.
You beautifully chart the transition from fucking as exercise to fucking as embodied pleasure. I don’t encounter many books about heterosexual sex that make it sound appealing! Ditto heterosexual marriage, which you write about with great tenderness. I found that very refreshing. Especially since I sometimes forget that memoirs need not hinge on traumatic events. Did you feel any trepidation about writing positively about your sex life and marriage?
I didn’t. I’m sure I have my marvelous insulating bubble of leftist perverts to thank for that. And maybe I should take this opportunity to say that my exposure to hostility from readers of the book is basically zero. I don’t read any online reviews, and a few people sent me shitty DMs or emails, but that was because they didn’t like something they saw about me online. They weren’t complaining about the book, which I’m sure they didn’t read.
Your background is in poetry though most of your recent published writing is nonfiction, including several pieces of viral literary criticism. In what ways did the desires and skills you developed as a lover of poetry influence your nonfiction aesthetic?
As a writer, whatever mode I’m in, whatever piece I’m working on, I want to create a certain experience for a reader; I want to induce and utilize the reader’s imagination and emotions for my own ends. Maybe “manipulation” is too negative a word for my goal, but I want the other person to understand or believe certain things, to feel a certain way, and so I’m attempting, to some extent, to control them. Poetry is the most sophisticated realization of that affective ability, so I was drawn to its mystery and power. I still am, though I’m ultimately more concerned with the moral implications of (all) writing than merely fascinated by the craft of it. It’s still an open question in my mind whether writing can inspire or support good and loving actions at the scale that it facilitates and fuels evil ones.
I love the idea of craft being more about the art of cultivating particular emotions and beliefs in the reader than, say, creating complex verbal texture or experimenting with unconventional structures, which I’m all for, but not every time. I’m also intrigued by what you say about the moral implications of writing. What might those implications be if we remove the expectation that art should inspire more ethical behavior?
I’m not sure. . . . I could go on about this forever, so it’s hard to know where to start or end.
I have a very old memory of recognizing as a child that many stories are about a person (usually a man but sometimes a grumpy old woman) who drives people away because they’re afraid of love and attachment: Love entails loss, and loss hurts too much to be borne. The result was one of my earliest commitments, an intentional moment of self-creation, when I resolved, “I’ll never do that. Resisting love is stupid.” I would say fiction taught me that, not any real life experience. And I’ve tried to live that way and keep that in mind when there is pain. But is this ethical behavior? I think so.
In creative writing workshops, both undergrad and graduate, professors said that political art was impotent, ineffective, and destined to obsolescence. Clearly this is untrue, though whether it’s the legacy of direct involvement by the CIA is beyond my expertise. Everything is political, even pop culture products designed for mindless consumption, intended as profitable entertainment with no meaning or message. Meaninglessness is a message.
Successful art is emotional education. You look at a painting or watch a movie or read a book and you have a sequence of internal reactions, and those emotions teach you something about yourself or give you an insight into the world, into relationships. Because it’s emotionally compelling, it feels important. But miseducation is a real phenomenon, and it’s as dishonest to pretend the conclusions are always right and beneficial as it is to pretend they’re always wrong and bad.
Intention is all we have when we do anything, including create. Intellectually I get it, but it’s a terrible struggle to accept that the impacts are beyond you. The situation of Matt Furie, who created Pepe the Frog, is haunting. How would it feel to draw a cute apolitical cartoon that becomes a lasting calling card for white supremacists? Just imagine if some superficially innocuous sentence you wrote became beloved by Nazis—like, they’re marching with it on posters, getting it tattooed on their bodies, making it their social media bios. I might want my work to do one thing and despite my best, most careful efforts, it might do another. If I truly can’t live with that possibility, the only option is to do nothing. Which also feels unsustainably irresponsible.
The ending paragraph is an unsentimental testament to marital affection and the joys of sharing happiness with loved ones. I might not have appreciated the ending if you had not already given us such expansive definitions of what care and love could look like earlier. When I finished reading, I realized that most of the nonfiction books I consume are structured as critiques. For me, critique is often a form of love. Instead of turning my back on what I love, I shine a light on it. But what I found fascinating about An Honest Woman was that you rarely use critique as an entry point to exploring a given topic, from labor to misogyny. You also include few outside sources. But An Honest Woman easily could have been a work of cultural criticism. Why did you choose to zero in on personal experience instead of zooming out to offer a broader critique?
You’re such a sharp reader! And this brings us back around to your first question in a cool way. An Honest Woman was originally conceived as cultural criticism and that was the emphasis in my proposal. I wrote about 35,000 words of that manuscript and hated it. It felt so passé to me, unimaginative, completely disconnected from everything important. I sold my book a month before Trump won the 2016 election, and the writing a lot of prominent white feminists did during and in the wake of his campaign was not useful, to put it politely. It became clear to me that these people were really out of their depth, and for me to write something coming out of the same tradition(s) they did would be to create something of no value. This may strike some as too strident or harsh but it’s how I felt then and still feel now. Not about all cultural criticism, but about a particular type.
I’d had this realization before, when I dropped out of grad school the second time: A lot of feminist engagement with the world, or what calls itself feminist engagement, is petty to the point of worthlessness, if it’s not actively detrimental to liberation. I’m not saying that in the cool girl, isn’t it sexier to not be a feminist way. I’m saying that as someone who kept turning to feminism and being disappointed by its frivolity and tenacious liberal bent. And as someone habitually disillusioned by this country’s institutions, from academia to publishing, the literary world to mainstream feminism. I’m in a perpetual cycle of existential crisis about how to live a life with integrity and meaning: I make an attempt, become discouraged, lapse into nihilism, rise more radicalized, repeat. I want writing to serve my desire to improve the world, but I don’t know if I’m capable of improving it with or without the writing.
Ultimately, with An Honest Woman, it felt like I could be at peace with the work if I conveyed what I truly believe, which is that men and women are meant to love each other because people of all genders are meant to love each other. We’re not natural enemies. We’re meant for connection and tenderness and intimacy, and it is worth fighting for.
Elizabeth Hall is the author of the books I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in nonfiction, and Season of the Rat, forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press in Fall 2022. Her essays have appeared in Bitch, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Observer, and elsewhere.
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