The Brooklyn Rail

At a reading I hosted in late January, artist and writer Sophia Giovannitti referred to Charlotte Shane as “the patron saint of heterosexual writing.” Shane’s prose has a magnetic quality, the impression of a liberated pulse running hot below its surface. Despite my personal lack of heterosexuality, I’m enchanted with her work, and I’m not alone. Her first two books, Prostitute Laundry and N.B., were originally released online in serial format, and they gained a deeply devoted readership. Her latest work, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work, is a lyrical survey of a career that she clearly excelled in due to many of the qualities that make her such an exceptional writer, including the honesty she applies rigorously, first and foremost, to herself. On the occasion of the memoir’s release, I talked to Shane about men as muses, memoir versus autofiction, and what it means to write and live in pursuit of connection.

Annie Lou Martin (Rail): When you set out to write An Honest Woman, did you have certain questions in mind? Who were you inspired by?

Charlotte Shane: It was originally going to be a synthesis of a lot of other citations, something much longer, and very different. I was spiraling in a way that feels, to me, like a writer’s way, where your thoughts branch out rapidly and widely, and you keep thinking, “I need to do some research about this.” I was going to write about Adam and Eve, and then I thought, “Mary Magdalene, I should research her!”

It’s funny to know it started out that way, because there are so few citations in the final version. Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory is super influential, and something I re-read every year. Thích Nhất Hạnh has been hugely influential for my thinking, if not necessarily on the prose level. Maggie Nelson’s early work was very important and striking to me, because of the lyrical quality; same thing for Anne Carson’s poetry, and poetry in general. My background was in poetry.

When I really started buckling down to write this, there was a big change in my relationship with a longtime client. It was unexpected and very destabilizing, and I realized, “Oh, this book needs to be about him.” It became much easier to shape once I realized that, because I had more of a frame: the trajectory of our relationship. I still talk about being a teenager, which I knew I really wanted to do. That section of the book is probably the oldest—it was part of my thinking when I wrote the proposal. But having that emotional core to work around facilitated writing the book. It lent itself to tracking my career, as well, because we met early enough that there were various evolutions while I knew him.

Rail: As a sex worker, you’re often the “muse,” but to me, the way you write about men is similar to the way many men write about women who are their “muses.” Are these men, in some ways, your muses?

Shane: I don’t know that I’ve ever put it that way to myself before, but I love it. It feels a little discordant to say, “I love men, I’m obsessed with men,” even though I clearly am; because for a decent chunk of my adulthood so far, I was super burnt out and really hated men. I can imagine someone who was exposed to me then hearing me now and thinking, “What a fraud! She hates men!” But I do feel like, in a way, this book is an ode to men, and I haven’t gotten it all out. I still haven’t captured what’s so compelling about boyishness, about certain types of masculinity. It’s endlessly fascinating to me. I think that is probably the most apt way to put it, that they’re my muses, because I just can’t get enough. It’s ever-replenishing, my appetite for them, and I find it very invigorating, even though it’s also kind of scary, yeah? To be that invested in them.

Rail: Early on in the book, you mention Despentes saying, “When men dream of being women, they imagine themselves as whores, not as housewives, because they can’t fathom giving up their freedom.” And later, you talk about “boys being synonymous with possibility.” There’s a way that men are allowed to be in the world that women aren’t, but whores kind of are. I’m wary of words like “freedom” or “autonomy,” but it’s interesting to think about sex workers representing those concepts to men.

Shane: The part you were pointing to in the book, that feeling that boys are somehow the entire world, and also the gatekeepers of the entire world? That was something I felt as a teen, one hundred percent, and I still sometimes feel. Even though, in some ways, I have more intimate or sustaining relationships with women, I don’t want to act as if I’ve divested from the feeling that men are necessary for me to live a full life.

I did this book review for The Nation years ago about Lynne Segal, an Australian feminist who was very prolific. Later in life, she was in a relationship with another woman, and she wrote about feeling closed out from relationships with men because of her age. Not just romantic or sexual relationships; her realm just didn’t really include men anymore—if I remember correctly—and she was not happy about that. That wasn’t her choice. It stayed with me because I thought, “If I were in her position, I’d feel exactly the same way.” Now that I’m out of my thirties, it’s easy to see that a lot of my freedom came from being young. Men do let whores into their realm, especially when those whores are in early adulthood. When I was younger, that feeling of license felt like it wouldn’t be revoked, because I didn’t recognize it as related to age. It felt like I got the lifetime pass, and sex work is what got me that lifetime pass. I think that’s semi-true; even if I’m not still doing it, I know how to cross the border forever now.

But also, I think part of my personal freedom comes from an almost brain-damaged degree of fearlessness. I don’t feel like I can take credit for it. It’s not that I’m a thrill seeker. I’ve done a lot of reckless things that weren’t appealing to me for their recklessness: I just did them because I wanted to. There’s a version of me that was blithely skipping and dancing around a minefield for almost two decades of my life, which obviously didn’t instruct me to be any warier, because I got away with it.

The other way I feel lucky is that, on the whole, I’m not very susceptible to shame. That limiting factor is pretty mild with me. I don’t really care that much about what anyone thinks of me. Maybe being a sex worker—and a mostly “out” sex worker—accelerated that, but I think it was true beforehand.

I attribute that to my mom. When I was a kid, there was a bully in my class, and she used to make up stories about me and my best friend vanquishing him. I really owe her one for that. I think that was one of the most formative things in my life that my mom taught me: not to take men seriously when they’re mean.

Rail: Your writing feels very attuned to bodily experience. You talk about yoga in Prostitute Laundry. I’ve done yoga since I was a kid, almost compulsively. I think compulsion is often related to fear, and by extension, desire and attachment. Is writing, for you, about desire or compulsion? Do you have any desire to attain a sort of unattachment?

Shane: N.B. and Prostitute Laundry were largely written very late at night, because I would get home from work so late. You normally need to claim some time for yourself when you get home that late, especially with sex work. There’s a whole process of returning to yourself, recalibrating. I wrote after work—compulsively, as you put it correctly—for many years.

With Prostitute Laundry, I started crafting things a little differently, and yoga helped in the earlier stage. Maybe the one exception to writing after a work appointment was writing after yoga, because I would feel particularly aware or inspired. I better recognize yoga now for what it has historically been, as preparation for meditation. It makes a lot more sense to me—how it functions beyond feeling freer in your body, or having more mobility. To become fully absorbed in your body and your breathing is transformative, and really useful for writing.

I think I do a decent job of being unattached, but I want to be even more so. The things I don’t want to detach from are the same things I’ve clung to for so many years, in my writing, too. In my earlier works, I’m kind of happily saṃsāric: I don’t want to leave the cycle of suffering, because I love the suffering too much. I love the things that will lead to suffering. I love intimacy. Maybe it’s possible to be unattached and love intimacy, but what I love about intimacy—the tenor of it—is what I have to change. That’s something I will probably keep grappling with my entire life.

I have no insights about it, but I think you’ve identified something that is, if not the central struggle of my life, then one of the central struggles. I’m getting back into a religious/spiritual/theological mindset, and I still come up against, “I can’t adopt any ideology that sees sex as an almost always corrupting influence.” I find sex too beautiful, and too important to how I want to connect with people. My desire to connect is not something I’m willing to sacrifice.

Rail: With non-monogamous relationships, especially, that can be challenging to navigate; both wanting deep commitment, while also seeking intensity and finding so much joy and value in other connections. I’m non-monogamous because I feel similarly about, well, why would I not pursue a connection? I want that for the people I love because I want it for myself. Connection is what’s important to me at the end of the day, with my writing, too. I want people to read something and feel, not necessarily like they’ve connected to “me,” but maybe to something in themselves.

It seems like many writers now want to be autofiction writers, and I have my speculations for why that is. For one, with social media, we have this innate understanding of the “I” as performance. What’s the value, for you, in writing a memoir as opposed to autofiction?

Shane: I love the autofiction point. I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes total sense that it’s what the next generation is gravitating toward. I can see the position that autofiction is more ethical than memoirs, because it seems to grant the reality that one person's perspective is never going to be “complete truth.” I can also imagine it feeling like insulation, because it’s so easy to get attacked online. There’s that sense that you have to have a lot of disclaimers and caveats, in case you’re taken in bad faith by a bunch of strangers.

When you mentioned that connection is really important to you and your writing, I don’t think it's ambitious in an unreasonable way, because I know there are no original thoughts or feelings. No matter what I've thought or felt, somebody else has thought and felt it, and not just one somebody else. It’s interesting to interrogate your own point of view, and to lean into it. To me, memoir is closer to how we experience the world than autofiction is. Like you said, I think it’s because autofiction is a self-conscious performance. Obviously, sometimes you’re self-conscious performing in memoir, but in ourselves and our voices to ourselves, we aren’t. We may be trying stuff on for size, but even then, you can document that—that it’s an experimentation. That type of dialogue is interesting to me, as long as it doesn’t get too indulgent. Isn’t it the basis of Western philosophy? We might benefit from bringing that back a bit, in a measured amount.

I think it’s fruitful and indispensable to consider yourself in relation to other people. But to really drill down into what you’re doing and thinking—in a way that hopefully doesn’t become narcissistic or navel-gazey—is just responsible.

Rail: I’m reading Body Work by Melissa Febos, and she talks about how men have never had to worry about whether their writing is “naval-gazey” or “narcissistic.” And Western philosophy is a tradition of, mostly, men. When women are writing about or interrogating the self, it’s often received as navel-gazey. When writing memoir, what do you view as your responsibilities?

Shane: It’s changed over the course of my career, because when I was writing N.B., there were no pictures of me, and I didn’t say where I lived. Now it’s different because my face is attached to the name I write under.

I try to disguise people. And I offered Sam, my partner, the option to read the book and ask me to take things out. He just said, “Oh, I trust you.” I don’t remember anyone contacting me to say, “What you said about me was a problem.” If a client I really cared about felt hurt by how I described them, I would feel bad about that. But generally, as a rule, I think people—especially men—just like to be acknowledged. I definitely had clients who were hoping they would be written about and were disappointed when they weren’t.

I would be open to hearing if somebody strongly felt I was doing something unethical. I genuinely don’t think I’ve written anything with some type of malicious intent. That’s never the point.

Rail: What is the point?

Shane: Maybe it’s too earnest to come back to connection, but what I learned and saw and felt very quickly in my career was this intense, unending amount of loneliness from men who are in relationships. You shouldn’t have to live a life that devoid of love, if the marriage is really “dead.” You also shouldn’t have to live a life where you’re not able to be close to this person you want to be close to, who probably wants to be close to you.

So, my highest aspiration for the book—besides readers feeling like it didn’t waste their time—is that it would make them cherish their relationships more, and be a little braver in their relationships. Maybe be more forthcoming. That, I think, is the theme across all three of my books. It’s this unnecessary divide that I find so intolerable, because I want to be close to men. But also, they should be close to other people who they clearly love despite their estrangement. I think that’s my highest aspiration for the book: that the people who read it feel like they’ve renewed their commitment to the people they love.