An Honest Woman Quotes

“Roger also began to talk about retirement, though he claimed that his coworkers, family, and I (“everyone” he mentioned it to) reacted to this with tacit disapproval, which he interpreted to be financially motivated. For me it was, but probably not as he thought; I simply didn’t see how we’d spend time together if he didn’t have work as his excuse for getting away. Perhaps his lack of concern about that obstacle was proof that he was formulating a plan for how to manage anyway. He always had a solution to those sorts of challenges. But I wondered if his wife’s lack of enthusiasm was a mirror of mine: not about the lost income, but the prospect of his spending more time at home.”
― Charlotte Shane, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work

“McLennan worked a lot with Ashley Dupré, a fact she plays up from the start of her book, The Price: My Rise and Fall as Natalia, New York’s #1 Escort. Ashley is described as young and guileless, not a savvy schemer like McLennan; her secret is that she has “the glow,” and “a near-perfect body” including a “beautiful coochie” that would make her the city’s next escort phenomenon.”
― Charlotte Shane, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work

“MY SENSE THAT I wasn’t sexually appealing could have kept me from sex work, but instead, I think, it drove me to it. I wanted so badly to be proven wrong. Optimism kept peeking up like the sun, rising in answer to every night of self-doubt. I visited Manhattan a few times in high school, and the remarks I received on the street there felt not like harassment but appreciation. It wasn’t quite being offered a modeling contract at the mall, but it was an indication that outside my small town, I could receive a different reception. The attention of the right men might transform me, or rather, reveal me.”
― Charlotte Shane, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work

“I saw that he stayed on alert, looking out for a woman who was worth looking at. He didn’t intend to do harm with his habitual judgment. He didn’t recognize that his attitude was capable of inflicting harm. Yet he felt entitled to do as he did, and entitlement is aggression compressed like a barbed spring beneath an expectation. He taught me that women could never escape male notice and evaluation, not even married mothers on a Sunday morning, weeding their front yards.”
― Charlotte Shane, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work

“I’ve still never held a job with a yearly salary or learned how to apply artful makeup.”
― Charlotte Shane, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work