Three porn memoirs proved excellent reads this year and also blew a load of insight into a trio of the hundreds of possible porn careers: Pillow Queen Superstar, Esoteric Steveporn Stud, and Gonzo Director with a Dream. Reading all three will impress upon you the fact that porn is a wild and varied place.
- “Sinner Takes All: A Memoir of Love And Porn” (Tera Patrick with Connie Borzillo). The most well known of the three memoirists also provides the most revealing and gutsy book. Tera Patrick manages to shine a light on her wild childhood and teenage runway model debauchery in Japan, her tumultuous relationship with her mother, her business triumphs and trials, substance abuse and institutionalization and – finally – her divorce from Evan Seinfeld in a book that still leaves a lot of room for humor and sex.
- “We Did Porn” (Zak Smith). Smith, a well-known visual artist who “did porn” as Zak Sabbath, gives a clever and hyperliterate but distanced rundown of life in the altporn universe with thinly-concealed references to Joanna Angel, Kimberly Kane, Mandy Morbid, Benny Profane, Ron Royster, and even yours truly (I appear as Monty Pentagram). Filled with subtle wit and observations of life in “the oughts,” Smith’s is a solid book with pages of his own artwork that says “I did it, but I am not of it.”
- “Confessions of An Ivy League Pornographer” (Sam Benjamin). Benjamin, like Smith an Ivy League grad, seemed to approach porn with the most thought and earnestness of the three, and shows the greatest arc of the three books, at least in terms of walking into the business with one idea and forcibly ejecting himself from it with another. The most self-deprecating of the three memoirs, “Confessions” also features the most winning, wretched protagonist.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: 2008 in review – Books about sex with strings attached
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