Camgirl by Isa Mazzei

 

Whoa. This is honestly one of the most brutal memoirs I've ever read, and even though it basically has triggers up and down the board for everything, from mental illness to explicit sexual content, I couldn't put it down. I don't think I've ever read a memoir that felt so much like fiction, in that the author really felt so much larger than life that she was like a character in her own movie. The way she writes about her experiences with so much brutal honesty sucks you right in.

Isa Mazzei grew up in an abusive household with two parents who were mentally ill. Their4 glamorous jobs put her in peripheral contact with celebrity, but she was kind of starved for affection and ended up socially manipulating her peers to get the accolades she wanted. As an adult, this behavior became magnified and she first started getting paid as a sugar baby but then started camming. And rather than being toxic, both these things gave her money and also allowed her to achieve sexual agency in a way that she really hadn't been able to do before.

I know a lot of people like to take cheap shots at sex work, and the people who do it, but at the end of the day, it is a job. And she really communicates that in this book, whether it's having to be "on" even in the middle of some personal crisis, to managing the needy and emotionally dependent men who claimed to be fans but constantly wanted to skirt the boundaries of what was professional and what was not, it was honestly draining to read. I can't imagine having to actually live and manage to that sort of lifestyle.

What a thought-provoking and interesting woman.

5 out of 5 stars