I found this line weeks ago.  I can’t remember when I wrote it or what brought it on.  It was isolated on a sheet with other notes, none as dramatic.  ‘I wanted to make strange men touch me.’ When did I want this?  Or rather, when will I stop wanting this?

Nightmare Brunette was originally a blog which Charlotte Shane, long time sex worker blogger and co-founder of Tits and Sass, decided to republish to coincide with the release of her Tinyletter memoir collection, Prostitute Laundry. Now she presents almost the entirety of Nightmare Brunette’s material in book form.

I love the way Shane discusses her customers most of all. She’s very open and honest about how relationships with clients are often blurry, strange things—the good, the bad, and the ambivalent.  There are bits of unexpected humor:

Most amusing of all was her dismounting line: ‘I can’t believe how many times you just made me come!’  Well.  No other woman in the room [would] believe it, either.

I really appreciate that Shane doesn’t write about clients with contempt.  She does discuss their flaws and her sex work-related irritations, but I never get the feeling that she is mocking anyone. Shane also discusses clients who crossed boundaries:

“So what’s the moral of the folktale?  I still can’t figure it out.  Is it that human beings are weak and at the mercy of their own urges?  That curiosity destroys?  That even in great love, it is impossible to refrain from harming others?  I don’t know.  I recognize the truth of it but I could not articulate a lesson beyond that of the importance of respecting someone else’s boundary, even if you don’t understand why that boundary exists.”

While Shane’s Prostitute Laundry focuses less on escorting, and more on the way her personal relationships are evolving and changing, N.B. touches more on the minutiae of sex work.  N.B. feels a bit more open to me, possibly because at the time the material was written, Shane wasn’t out as its author. Since this work was originally on a blog, her voice here feels more personal, like she is trying to hold back less.  This is a conscious choice—in N.B. Shane discusses the delight she sometimes takes in feeling unknowable, and deciding what to reveal and what not to reveal. She ends up sharing quite a lot in these pages. I especially appreciated the frank talk about her abortion.