Prostitue Laundry is the collected newsletters of Charlotte Shane, about her life as an escort. I’ll admit that, inevitably, there is some prurient interest in a book like this, but I think I would have been attracted to it regardless of the exact subject matter - the idea of the contemporaneous accounts, the author not knowing what is next, that appeals to me greatly. I have a thing for wanting to know people’s inner monologues, and this is pretty damn close to getting that.
But, yes, fine. I might have been less likely to pick it off the shelf and eventually buy it had it been the collected newsletters of a beekeeper or a software engineer. There is something unknowable about that world, where you might be dismayed to have your preconceptions confirmed but disappointed to find them unlived up to. I’m sure there are various reasons why this interests me, some more obvious than others, but I think a large element is that the nature of the work probably implies an inherent sense of frankness about it - when sex is labour, it loses that sheen and becomes something to be discussed as straightforwardly as anything else.
Obviously the way Shane writes and the subjects on which she writes are informed by this, but it’s striking how little of the book is about escorting itself, more the relationships she has around it - her boyfiend, Craigslist hookups both short and long term, clients who aren’t really clients. The subtext (and sometimes text) of how being an escort outside those relationships can subtly and not so subtly alter how she is in them is by far the key part of Prostitute Laundry.
In the latter portion of the book, it is fascinating to watch Shane meet someone she truly loves and to what extent the weight of her history (all of it) is too much to hang off that love, that eternal cord she worries she may let go of. Not in, as she describes it, the typical call girl memoir of meeting a good man and turning her life around for the better, but all of it. How much is too much?
It’s interesting to consider where the line is between this and autofiction, or more precisely, why I instinctively consider there to be a line at all. If this had been presented to me as fiction, I would have bought it, and all the small details that allow me to empathise with it would have hit equally hard, but I would in some sense have experienced it differently.