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 provocative and tender reckoning of what it means to be a heterosexual woman and a feminist in a misogynistic society.

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 personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at 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, Shane's memoir is a merciless and moving love letter to straight 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.

"It's funny, authentic, and unequivocally honest. A graceful and candid look into sex, intimacy, misogyny, and identity." Kirkus Reviews

"Refreshingly, Shane depicts the good of sex work (its liberatory potential, for example) as thoroughly as the bad (its occasional reinforcement of patriarchal structures). This slim volume packs a punch." Publishers Weekly

"Shane is an erudite writer, funny and disarming, and her memoir holds space for all of the dualities of love and sex work." Booklist

Charlotte Shane is a nonfiction author and essayist. She is the author of Prostitute Laundry and N.B., both published by TigerBee Press, which she cofounded in 2015. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Bookforum, Harper's, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere.