Through the lens of her years spent as a sex worker, Charlotte Shane offers a reckoning of what it means to be a heterosexual woman and a feminist in a misogynistic society.
Shane’s memoir begins with recollections of her adolescence, when she was an avid student of desire, and it ends with a moving account of her marriage to a man she loves. In less than 200 pages, the book manages to be part autobiography, part anthropological investigation and part feminist tract ... A strange and poignant love story.
Shane’s writing has an exposing, unmediated style ... What makes Shane a more adept interpreter of gendered suffering and sexual autonomy than many of her contemporaries is her attunement to both the mechanics of the body and the ruses of the psyche ... Shane is compelled by the numinous attraction that pulls her toward sexual partners, and the unguarded tenderness that certain clients feel toward her. The task of her writing is to take these appetites seriously ... For Shane, prying out the splinters of masculine threat lodged inside her has been the work of a life.
Slim but mighty ... Shane’s memoir reads more like a series of opinion pieces than a chronology of events ... As insightful as it may seem, An Honest Woman does have its blind spots — and uncharacteristically judgmental sore points ... May defy expectations of the genre. Yes, it’s a racy, salacious tell-all at times, but it’s also a refreshingly candid and provocative think piece — one that questions the blurry boundaries of attachment when it comes to pleasure, the complicated nature of intimacy, and the murkiness of feelings surrounding who and how we love.
