AN HONEST WOMAN

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. Charlotte Shane received her MA in Poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and is the author of two books, Prostitute Laundry and N.B., both published by TigerBee Press (which she co-founded in 2015) to acclaim from a wide variety of outlets including like NPR's On The Media, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Vice, The Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review podcast. Charlotte was the host and curator of Bad Advice From Bad Women, a monthly reading series that was held across the country (but mostly in New York City) for two years. She's a regular contributor to The Nation, Bookforum, The New Republic, The TLS, and The New Inquiry, and her work has also appeared in Harper's, Dissent, Salon, New York Magazine, Jezebel, and Hazlitt.