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A review by yetilibrary
Spent by Antonia Crane
4.0
A friend recommended this to me. It WAS really good: Crane is an engaging writer with a lot of stories to tell. The book is a little disorganized, however, and the timeline gets blurry in ways that's not intentional. There are also typos of the inexcusable variety ("teaming" for "teeming" and "stationary" for "stationery"), but I just caught a national newspaper using "principals" instead of "principles," so let's all just go hug a copy editor today, shall we?
The memoir talks a lot about sex work, stripping/ exotic dancing, terminal illness (including euthanasia), and drug use. One thing I learned: the physical toll stripping/dancing takes on the body after years of doing it. One ick factor: how gross sex work can get. (If you can make it past the opening chapter, you're fine.) One omission: the violence sex workers experience is largely glossed over. Crane mentions a few harrowing incidents in one paragraph near the end of the book, but that's mostly it (aside from danger sensed or feared). I can't blame her for not wanting to talk about it, and yet she was so open about so many other aspects of her life and her jobs, its absence is notable. She often makes the point that sex work is easy money but it isn't easy work, and it can be dangerous work, but here those dangerous edges have been smoothed over so much it looks deceptively safe overall. That strikes me as a disservice.
The memoir talks a lot about sex work, stripping/ exotic dancing, terminal illness (including euthanasia), and drug use. One thing I learned: the physical toll stripping/dancing takes on the body after years of doing it. One ick factor: how gross sex work can get. (If you can make it past the opening chapter, you're fine.) One omission: the violence sex workers experience is largely glossed over. Crane mentions a few harrowing incidents in one paragraph near the end of the book, but that's mostly it (aside from danger sensed or feared). I can't blame her for not wanting to talk about it, and yet she was so open about so many other aspects of her life and her jobs, its absence is notable. She often makes the point that sex work is easy money but it isn't easy work, and it can be dangerous work, but here those dangerous edges have been smoothed over so much it looks deceptively safe overall. That strikes me as a disservice.