Book Review: “Whore of New York” by Liara Roux

***3/3***

Sometimes you read a book that just grabs you.  The people in it, the narrative becomes something you can crawl inside of, that you can feel.  Mostly that is a kind of happy only narrative.

Whore of New York by Liara Roux, was just such a book.  An autobiography, the book is a rare glimpse into the genesis of an escort.  What her life was like growing up.  How she came to the work.  Glimpses of her experiences.

Reviews are so often promotional in nature, breathless in their descriptions, tantalising and titillating. Especially when they have a whiff of scandal or sex about them. I found this book to be one of the best renditions of this Demi-monde. It is raw, confessional, at times sexy, but also brutal and harsh.

What I loved most about the book was that it didn’t fetishize or glamourise Sex Work.  In fact, it is hardly about Sex Work at all.  It is a book about life, relationships, growing up, mental health.  It is a very human narrative.

Central to the book is an exploration of feeling and motivation, none of which is presented as “because of this, I did this”…but rather simply showing her life as it unfolded.  Yes, an author can always be selective about the information they convey, but there was nothing here that felt out of place, artificial, forced.

Reading of her marriage to an abusive partner, it was impossible not to be in her pain with her.  The feeling of loyalty to a partner, the internalisation that ‘I am the one at fault’, not the abuser.  How common that is for those of us who have experienced this.  How we seek to please those around us.

There is very little in the book about Sex Work itself.  There is some discussion of the relentless pace and travel schedule she maintained, but it is more about how her wife exploited her, abused her, used her, took her money and made her work despite its horrible effects on the author’s health.  

The snippets of her work life are sympathetically portrayed as she focusses on a small number of clients that she enjoyed spending time with.  What I took from these gentle narrations was not the act or content of their interactions, but her descriptions of how she nurtured her clients, and how they also took care of her.

We, society at large, often concentrate on the exploitative elements that we might imagine comes with this work.  There was none of that.  If anything, one takes away how for Liara, Sex Work gave independence, purpose.  It is also painfully clear that she is a bright, well-educated human, one with options, choices.  That she chose the profession she did becomes very understandable as we see her through her childhood and young adulthood.

A part of what resonated for me in her story is how parallel the “finding herself” aspects of beginning in the Profession related to what I am going through now.  Figuring out what I want to do and why, what my boundaries are, who I am willing to see, how much I am willing to work, why I would even do it in the first place.  All great questions.

This book was hard for me to put down.  It is engaging and well-written, with an enticing prose style.  I hope that she takes this opener and continues to write, whether about her own life or through fiction.

It is not often that an autobiography reads so compellingly, and that you want to cheer for her success, protect her from the jerks, help her to see the toxic people and their bad ways around her…in short, it is one of those few stories where she is in your living room, in your life, fully human, fully manifest, fully come to life.

If you are interested at all in having a glimpse into the life of a high-end escort, what brought her there, what keeps her there, and what kind of lifestyle she lives, this is a great place to start.