Belle de Jour
On Charlotte Shane's new memoir An Honest Woman.
Towards the end of her serialized memoir Prostitute Laundry (2015), the writer and sex worker Charlotte Shane admits that she’d always chafed against the idea of writing a conventional memoir. Shane didn’t want to follow the prescribed narrative arc of the “sex worker memoir,” wherein resolution is typically achieved through professional denouement. Shane describes the arc as: “Meet a Good Guy, fall in love, quit the work, know that whoring is entirely in the past forever, period, goodbye.”
Originally written as a newsletter, Prostitute Laundry is a compelling feat of confessional writing that chronicles Shane’s exploits from February 2014 to September 2015. She sees clients, contemplates plastic surgery (and goes through with it), falls in and out of love, contends with a particularly painful betrayal, and reflects on the labors of love and sex. Shane proves herself a formidable spur-of-the-moment memoirist, capable of synthesizing and studying the minutiae of recent events with admirable clarity. She swiftly shifts between her desires, fantasies, fears, and hopes to conjure a profoundly intimate portrait of her day-to-day life. Characters and conversations are reconstructed with novelistic detail. And even as her romantic fate approaches the realm of Hollywood cliché, Shane is far too self-aware to fall into the trap of the trite ending she spurns.
Once Shane meets Max, the man who will become her husband, she knows their relationship is destined to be “[her] final act”: “Max was my happy ending, the ending that’s happy because it’s the beginning of a thoroughly joyous adventure,” Shane writes. “But even if it held true, the cliché sex worker conclusion couldn’t be mine. I still hadn’t quit working.” The suspense of her “slow slope” towards retirement had yet to be resolved by Prostitute Laundry’s end; Shane intends to keep seeing some long-time clients. But despite her initial resistance to any allusion of retirement, the memoir succeeds because it succumbs to this inevitability. It doesn’t force a resolution for the readers’ sake but dwells in the uncertainty of what might come after.
An Honest Woman (2024), the final installment of Shane’s unofficial trilogy of memoirs, arrives about a decade after N.B. (2013) and Prostitute Laundry (2015)—and it may be Shane’s most conventionally structured work yet. (This is no surprise, as An Honest Woman is Shane’s first book with a major publisher; Shane had founded Tiger Bee via a Kickstarter campaign, the press behind her two earlier works.) The tightly organized narrative, which is divided into seven chapters, spans decades of Shane’s life, grounding personal experience alongside social commentary on adultery, sex work, and female desirability.
This is familiar territory to devoted readers of Shane’s work. An Honest Woman broadens what we know of Shane’s autobiography, from her teenage days as an impressionable tag-along to a group of male friends to her grad-school stint as a cam girl. Milestone events, like the only bachelor party she’d ever worked and her first day at an in-call agency, are detailed through brief vignettes—a sharp contrast to the close-up confessionals that comprised N.B. and Prostitute Laundry. There’s significantly less sex and fewer noteworthy figures referred to by name.
This macroscopic approach lacks the cumulative intensity of Shane’s serialized work, which compels the reader to treat every developing entry with suspenseful gravitas. Initially, I craved the raw toughness of N.B. and the sobering, raunchy clarity of Prostitute Laundry. But while the stakes in An Honest Woman feel somewhat diminished, Shane reconciles her distance from recounted events with a surprising tenderness.
For some memoirists, the passage of time is crucial to unearthing the past’s buried truths. “Memoir done right is an art, a made thing,” writes Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir. “It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page. You’re making an experience for a reader, a show that conjures your past—inside and out—with enough lucidity that a reader gets way more than just a brief flash of titillation.” Here, Shane filters out “the brief flash[es] of titillation” and a rigid sense of chronology to achieve a greater depth of feeling. It’s a fitting retrospective to her rollercoaster of a career and potentially the last thing she will ever write about sex work1.
An Honest Woman is anchored around Shane’s longest and most devoted client, Roger, and their nine-year relationship. Shane was 28 when she first met Roger, 54, a “serious, outwardly dispassionate [lawyer] with no penchant for luxury or debauchery.” Roger was an easy client: polite, earnest, reliable, and generous. The brief mention he earned in Prostitute Laundry confirmed his inoffensive magnanimity, relative to the rotating cast of men that populated Shane’s life. She felt grateful for his consistent patronage, and was flattered by the pedestal he put her on. When Shane considered retiring, “the notion of leaving [Roger] celibate and worse, lonely, for the remaining decades of his life” weighed on her. “That force alone would not have kept me working, but it was a factor,” she admitted.
Roger, in a sense, is the antithesis of the “Good Guy” in Shane’s professional life (“Meet a Good Guy, fall in love, quit the work,” etc). Their arrangement was “built on a bedrock of tactful obfuscation,” where cash was transacted for attention and intimacy. Nevertheless, the years-long relationship yielded a sense of duty and commitment from both parties, even if their motivations for continuing it differed. Shane had no illusions about the basis of their relationship. No matter how much Roger claimed to worship her (“Because I worship you, the smallest crumb you toss in my direction is a feast for my ego,” reads one of Roger’s emails), Shane knew that her purpose was to offer the physical intimacy that Roger’s marriage lacked; she was his wife’s sexual understudy. At the same time, she treasured how their closeness transcended mere transaction. “I don’t believe Roger chose me because I’m so exceptional, though maybe I was exceptionally suited to him,” Shane wrote of their affinity for each other. “I believe I felt familiar to him in ways outside of my, or his, control.”
Shane never harbored any romantic or lustful feelings for Roger (his sexual tastes, she described, was “as modest as a monk’s”), nor did she resent her limited role in his life. The memoir’s most moving sections grapple with the quiet love underlying their bond once it becomes strained from Roger’s sudden illness. His declining health introduced new pressures, revealing facets of Roger’s character that Shane previously didn’t surmise—namely, his commitment to appearing like a “paragon of marital virtue,” which cemented his decision to keep Shane away from his deathbed. “He would die proud of having hidden me,” Shane wrote. “I didn’t know that about him before he got sick. I don’t know if he did either.”
Towards the end, Shane began relating to the figure of the mistress when considering the precarity of being “the other woman” for a living. She describes the “horrible finality” of being closed out of a man’s life and the public record: “You blast into his larger life like a bomb, or you don’t enter at all. What radical loneliness those women must feel in these situations.” An Honest Woman reckons with testimonial urgency the value and pain of such connections, however unorthodox or illicit they may seem in the public eye.
A recurrent theme in Shane’s writing is this surprising capacity for connection and intimacy, despite our limitations and shortcomings. And while she may harbor the sensibilities of a romantic, Shane is not deluded by the guise of fantasy (“I pared myself down for that fantasy and polished what was left behind, to accommodate whatever the client would bring to and place upon me”).
This perceptiveness tethers her (and readers) to the complex relationship between sex and vulnerability and, consequently, the reality of her job. As an escort, Shane is attentive, empathetic, curious, and tough—not a hooker with a heart of gold, but a steely-eyed service worker, capable of loving, hating, and ultimately, thriving at her job.
In her 2014 book Playing The Whore: The Work of Sex Work, the journalist Melissa Gira-Grant employs the term “the prostitute imaginary” to describe the illusions and delusions that society harbors about sex workers. The prostitute is rarely acknowledged as a woman or a worker, despite the affective labor intrinsic to the trade. She is instead regarded as a sexualized scapegoat, a catch-all subject who embodies “the fantasies and fears about sex and the value of human life.” Society’s fixation on the moral symbolism of sex work has historically detracted from the labor, humanity, and dignity of those who perform it; the prostitute is simultaneously diminished and defined by her role in the sexual marketplace.
Only in recent decades have sex workers been able to widely challenge these narrow narrative conventions—through the publication of memoiristic tell-alls, collective anthologies, critical reportage, and personal essays. Memoir, in particular, presents itself as a liberatory genre, allowing marginalized writers to define—or reclaim, per pop culture’s empowerment parlance—their identity on the page. Shane initially conceived of An Honest Woman as a work of feminist cultural criticism, which she sold on proposal in 2018. The idea, however, soon began to feel dated. It wasn’t until the pandemic and the dissolution of her relationship with Roger that year that Shane encountered a new framework for the book—as a love story that defies traditional romantic conventions.
In a newsletter published in July, Shane wrote that she hopes An Honest Woman could lead readers “to love more thoughtfully, to love better.” Love remains loosely defined here and in the book, but I’m reminded of what the philosopher Simone Weil said about how our “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” What Shane offered her clients was attention in the form of intimacy and physical closeness—a kind of proxy to love. And in providing these services, she recognized what was necessary to forge meaningful connections. It requires shedding the armor of “ego and disinterest” that some men have cocooned themselves in, or setting aside pride to investigate the “private proclivities” of one’s spouse.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the ending of An Honest Woman mirrors Prostitute Laundry—with Shane’s marriage to Sam (formerly referred to as Max) as the endnote to her escorting days. For years, Shane thought of marriage as an abstract concept. She felt too young for such a commitment, even in her thirties. Meeting Sam changed all of these long-held beliefs. Despite being privy to the pitfalls and pain points of her clients’ marriages, Shane was never a cynic about love, sex, or long-term partnership. Her experience has only affirmed her love for Sam and the mutual sanctity of their bond.
The seventh and final chapter, which is exclusively devoted to their relationship, details the depths of their connection, while briefly alluding to a period of pre-marital strife. This love story seems almost out of place with the rest of the book; it reads like the beginning of a marriage memoir despite serving as its conclusion. The specifics of their domestic disputes are purposefully elided. And yet, it’s clear that Shane is still living through the questions she’s posed in the final pages, as she considers the capricious whims of desire and how that plays out in one’s marriage over time.
“You can love someone very much without complete knowledge of them, and you usually have to because we are enigmas even to ourselves,” Shane remarks earlier in the book. She was referring to Roger’s unwavering affection for her, but this sentiment also captures the ongoing predicament in Shane’s marriage and long-term partnership in general.
Even when we crave “the maximum level of being” together with another person, how can we reconcile these blind spots? How much can we know about our beloved? But Shane is not weighed down by the unanswerable; she side-steps these questions towards an open-armed acceptance.
I found these elisions somewhat dissatisfying, but I became deeply moved by the childlike adoration that Shane reserves for her husband. It is hard to write soberly and honestly about love without sounding too mawkish or resorting to clichés, and the range and precision of emotion conveyed is astonishing. I’ve since returned to this final chapter many times, and it has simultaneously challenged and bolstered my beliefs about romantic union, marriage, and the delicate balance that makes such commitments worthwhile.
Shane describes how content she is observing Sam’s joy, from afar and up close. His happiness reverberates in her by some divine law of transference. She does not seek to possess it or him. Nevertheless, the ache for closeness persists. “Dream of total union: everyone says this dream is impossible, and yet it persists,” writes Roland Barthes in The Lover’s Discourse. “I do not abandon it.” Perhaps this very dream is what fuels desire—a utopian state that remains perennially out of our grasp but we pursue anyway, over and over again.
“I tried to distill everything I “learned” from sex work during my two decades of doing it, and I don’t expect to write about the topic again because I finally have no more to say,” Shane wrote in her personal newsletter in July.
Thanks for such a deep dive into Shane’s work. It is such a great question: how can we love someone we can never really know? And yet we do. Or at least we think we do.