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In Lizzie Borden’s 1986 film Working Girls, which follows a day in the life of queer sex worker Molly and her coworkers at an upscale Manhattan brothel, outwardly genteel yet privately hotheaded Lucy (the brothel madam and a former escort herself) describes her life’s work thus: “The two things I love most in life are sex and money. It’s just that I didn’t know until much later that they were connected.” Taken out of context, Lucy’s quote can be seen as a kind of through line for Whore of New York (Penguin Random House), an incendiary new memoir from Liara Roux that unpacks her own alternately high-octane and utterly quotidian experience as a sex worker.
Out this week, the memoir chronicles Roux’s life, from her upbringing in a conservative Christian household and her abusive relationship with her former wife to her eventual exploration of SeekingArrangement and ensuing foray into sex work. It’s an account of sex work that focuses on the actual experience of the person doing the working rather than employing the same old, one-dimensional tropes. Recently, Vogue spoke to Roux about the spurious notion of the dream job, her cover’s winking reference to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and what she feels is missing from the cultural conversation around sex work.
Vogue: Your book made me think about labor of all kinds, and I’m wondering whether you believe in the concept of a dream job at this point.
Liara Roux: Personally, I enjoy doing so many different things that any job where I get to dabble is probably my dream job. I don’t know if I can see myself doing one thing every day for the rest of my life.
I know you’re not new to writing about sex work, but was it difficult to be so transparent in memoir form?
It was, and I don’t think it’s necessarily about being associated with sex work. I included a lot of personal stuff in my book, and I don’t want to hurt anyone who I wrote about, especially not people that I care about. Sometimes people can be really sensitive to how they’re written about; writing an article about being a sex worker is one thing, but writing a memoir is a lot more complicated. Even just writing about my clients, I didn’t want anyone to read about one bad experience and think it was about them. I’m neurotic about those kinds of things.
Is there anything you consistently see mischaracterized about sex work or anything you wish people understood better about it?
I think a lot of people either glamorize the work and think that it’s super easy, or they think that it’s this horrible, awful, exploitative, fucked-up industry. I think the truth is somewhere in between, and it really just depends on each person’s individual experience. Some people have relatively easy and fun experiences with sex work, and then other people have truly toxic and abusive experiences, but for a lot of people, it’s somewhere in between.
How has it been watching initial reactions to the memoir?
It’s been really positive, so far! I was expecting much more polarizing reviews, and it hasn’t been widely reviewed yet, but overall I think the lowest review I’ve gotten is a three-star on Goodreads from someone who was mad that I wasn’t talking about my trauma more. [Laughs.]
Are there cultural reference points about sex work that you’ve liked in the past or feel like you’re working in the tradition of?
I really love Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life, which documents her time doing sex work. I think that book was really what made me think that I could pursue sex work for myself. When I first read Marie’s writing, actually, I was really upset, and people will have that visceral response to my writing too. Hopefully, though, as they sit with it, people will be able to process why writing about sex work, and sex in general, can sometimes be so upsetting. There are too many books for me to list, but I also love Charlotte Shane’s writing.
Is your book cover an intentional reference to Ottessa Moshfegh, or am I just seeing things?
I definitely did love the cover of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and kind of wanted to reference it or do an homage to it. I sent her cover to my publisher and was like, “This is cool!” And I feel like they did something very similar. [Laughs.] I really love her writing, and I’m happy to have it be a little bit of a reference to that. I was actually doing a signing at a bookstore recently and noticed that hot pink seemed to be on every cover, and I was like, “Ottessa Moshfegh really started something.”
** I’ve noticed that too! What do you think that’s about?**
I think it’s really about femininity, and a lot of people are really starting to write about young girl–ness in a very intellectual way. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl was published in 2001, but around 2010 people started writing about teenage girls and selfies, and now I think people are starting to mine the teen and early-20s years of young women in order to explore capitalism. Young women are often portrayed as peak consumerists, right? They’re at the mall, they’re shopping with their friends, and they’re at this sort of nexus of narcissism and consumerism and commodification of the self that people have a lot of feelings about. I think using hot pink sort of signals that the book is going to touch on that. It’s also very queer too!
Is there any aspect of sex work that you wish was written about more within that canon we discussed?
In the writing that I’ve read, there has been some exploration of what it’s like to be queer as a sex worker. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen many movies that really capture how gay sex workers are! Hustlers was homoerotic, but it didn’t really go there. From what I’ve seen, it’s really hard to remain straight in an industry where you’re dealing with men who can be really pushy and then you’re surrounded by all these beautiful, amazing women who are also very sexually skilled and totally available. [Laughs.]