An Honest Woman: A Memoir Of Love And Sex Work by Charlotte Shane

Being a complicated woman who tries to deal with myself honestly, it wasn’t a surprise to me that a lot of what Charlotte Shane has to say in her memoir about sex work is stuff I’ve already thought about. Honestly, it’s stuff that most, if not all, thoughtful non-sex-worker-exclusionary feminists have grappled with too. At the heart of the issue, ofc, is the role of marriage in a patriarchal society, and how the concepts of sex and fidelity are deeply bound to it within those structures.

Ms Shane examines these concepts through the lens of her own time as a sex worker, and what led her to choose it as a profession. Unsurprisingly, there is a terrible father in her background. More intriguingly is the relatively good luck she’s had with men otherwise, from the boys she befriended and messed around with in high school, to the clientele she cultivated (or blocked when they behaved badly) as her career grew and changed from cam girl to exotic masseuse to escort.

Tho she’s undoubtedly undergone some unpleasant encounters with awful men, what’s most striking about her account is how the stories from her professional life mirror the love lives of modern women who don’t have purely transactional relationships with men. While she doesn’t congratulate herself on how she’s at least made money off of experiences that have left most women with, at best, bittersweet memories — she does an excellent job of evading anything even remotely close to smugness throughout, thank goodness — it’s impossible to read her book and not feel like women who aren’t sex workers too easily give away their time and care and emotions to men who just aren’t worth it.

At the heart of this injustice is the assumption that emotional labor is something that women should provide for the men in their lives regardless of what they receive in return. In her memoir, Ms Shane is clear-eyed about what she gets out of the company of the men she chooses to spend time with, before and after embarking on her career path. It’s honestly refreshing. Relationships should always have give and take, and even when both parties aren’t sure of what they really want, they should always strive to treat each other fairly, as the author and most of her men in this book do.

For all that, I do think that Ms Shane’s positive attitude colors so much of this memoir. Perhaps that isn’t the correct term: it’s almost a relentlessly optimistic attitude, an “I survived so what he did can’t have been that bad” sort of looking back that I find myself doing sometimes too, even at things we both objectively know are Not Okay. This was most jarring when she talks about not understanding when some of her fellow sex workers get vindictive with their clients, especially when she acknowledges that being an asshole is the only language some jackasses understand. It was a bit of a weird note in an otherwise open-hearted consideration of her life experiences.

The most moving part of the book was, perhaps surprisingly, her depiction of her time with an older client she calls Roger, who was her main source of income for quite a while. Their relationship was only occasionally carnal: often, she felt more like a paid listener and friend than an escort. But as he got older and his health deteriorated, the tenuousness of her position in his life became brutally exposed. As his secret lover, she wasn’t allowed to be seen to care about him or help with the rest of his life. She couldn’t do anything that might show that she was more than just an editor he collaborated with, as he once lied to his wife when the latter found a check addressed to her. Ms Shane didn’t even find out that he’d died until six weeks afterwards, via Googling his name. The impossibility of being acknowledged made her feel as if she didn’t deserve to mourn someone she’d cared about for almost a decade of her life. Her story is wrenching, and I had tears in my eyes as she wrote of her grief and anger at being relegated to nothingness when she and Roger had been so important to each other, albeit unconventionally, for so long.

Not that I’m comparing that to my own history or anything, ha. Seriously, tho, dismantle the patriarchy: it only keeps people isolated, shamed and harmed, all in the name of preserving men’s ideas of their own reputations.

Anyway, Ms Shane ends the book by talking a little bit about the man she fell in love with and married, with a ferocity of love and commitment that makes my heart long for something similar. She’s a little vague on the reasons they fought during the most turbulent period of their relationship, tho explains that away with an excellent metaphor about drowning and coming ashore. Regardless, her commitment to being as honest as possible gives this remarkable memoir a heft that makes it required reading for anyone questioning the confines that women are shunted into when it comes to marriage, sex and fidelity. There are other ways to exist, as Ms Shane unashamedly shows, more honest ways that cause less pain in the end. Perhaps most importantly, she reminds readers that it’s okay to ask for what you’re worth, financially or otherwise, and to not settle for less.

An Honest Woman: A Memoir Of Love And Sex Work by Charlotte Shane was published August 13 2024 by Simon & Schuster and is available from all good booksellers, including