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Table of Contents
About The Book
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.
Product Details
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2024)
- Length: 192 pages
- ISBN13: 9781982126865
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Raves and Reviews
One of the New York Times and New York Magazine/ Vulture's Most Anticipated Books of 2024
“A rigorous and compulsively readable memoir about her career as a sex worker and the possibilities of romantic love between men and women. Shane excavates her relationships with her father and the boys she grew up with, measuring the harm of inherited lessons about sex and the value of girls’ hotness against the power and freedom sex work later afforded her. This personal and professional investigation resonates and entices.” –New York Magazine
"Shane’s unsparing honesty illuminates what it means for her to seek love, intimacy and relationships with these men under a cloud of misogyny."--New York Times Book Review
"In compulsively readable, confessional prose, Shane probes her own experiences with desire, being desired, and the desire to be desired. She exposes the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy infect every union."--Bustle
“Astute in her social critiques, the author demonstrates her intuitive understanding of how people can build more fulfilling relationships with one another.... It's funny, authentic, and unequivocally honest. A graceful and candid look into sex, intimacy, misogyny, and identity.” –Kirkus
“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
“With An Honest Woman, Charlotte Shane's already-formidable clarity and grace as a critic and essayist are here turned so honestly, so ruthlessly to an examination of womanhood—of how women make ourselves known to ourselves and to each other under patriarchy. She is one of the very, very few writers I want to read writing about our lives with straight men.” —MELISSA GIRA GRANT, author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and staff writer at The New Republic
“The first book I’ve burned through in a single sitting in months. Elegant, candid, merciless and moving—it’s an experience to make a reader reconsider how love works.”—TORREY PETERS, author of Detransition, Baby
“I'm in love with Charlotte Shane's writing here, full as it is of clarity, earned beauty, and a deep intelligence at once cerebral and embodied, tender and brutal. I inhaled this book.” —SARAH THANKAM MATTHEWS, author of All This Could Be Different
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): An Honest Woman Hardcover 9781982126865