How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale by Jenna Jameson

 

I wonder how many people were taken in by that title and then shocked by how jaded and disillusioned Jenna Jameson was about her industry. HOW TO MAKE LOVE LIKE A PORN STAR is such an odd book because, as others have pointed out, the tone is all over the place. The book starts out pretty grim, with the death of her mother from terminal cancer, her getting mixed up with an emotionally closed off tattoo guy whose biker friend rapes her, and then, later, she finds her murdered best friend who was also getting raped by the biker guy (who was her dad, also, YIKES). After that, it gets into her sex work, which started with stripping and gradually became movies.

What makes HOW TO MAKE LOVE LIKE A PORN STAR such an odd book is that it's like an oral history of Jenna Jameson and the porn industry. On my Kindle this book is a whopping 700+ pages long and I don't think it really needed to be. A lot of that page count is photos, many of which are NSFW, and some of them are placed in weird spots. Like, she'll be describing a hardcore scene and then there will be a picture of her as a kid with her family. Or when she was talking about her rape and its effects on her, there might be a topless glamor shot.

I thought the memoir parts were interesting but then the second half of the book took a mixed media route, and they incorporated things like her old journal entries (which weren't scanned well), interviews between her and her dad and her brother, and passages written from people she worked with. There's also comic book pages based on her life and tongue-in-cheek snippets, like one where she talks about the answers she might give in an interview when she's in a good mood versus a bad one.

Overall this was a pretty interesting read and not my usual fare but it was interesting to read another take about a women who used to work in porn. However, if you want a book that goes the "Yay, porn! I love my job!" route, I think I'd read Asa Akira's memoir over this one.

3 out of 5 stars