How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale by Jenna Jameson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
How am I going to describe this book? For starters, I’m a porn fan, but not of Jenna Jameson. In porn, she is plastic, superficial and pathetic. This did not dampen my curiosity, however. I am an avid reader of the writings of the porn star Stoya; the difference is that Stoya has an extremely sharp intellect.
Jenna Jameson’s autobiography is well-written. It is also frustratingly laid out, much like her life. It is filled with photographs; broken up with interviews; punctuated with comic strips; scattered with sketches. She must have had an outstanding editor, because it hangs together very, very well.
Essentially, Jenna Jameson = porn because: revenge. Which, while being possibility the most un-self-reflective thing someone could write into an autobiography (perhaps the point), is also predictable as fuck. The story of Jenna’s life is also what you would expect: total white trash, lots of drugs and bad decisions.
She gives sex work a really bad name. I was hoping to see “I got into porn because I love to fuck”. But really she has very little self-respect, and a confidence borne only of an arrogance resulting from diva-dom.
The most interesting parts of this book were those in which Jameson attempts to make sense of her life through writing; the poignant parts of her life are exactly that: poignant. And while I am well aware that abused women tend not to make a lot of sense of their lives and the choices that they make, the fact that she made the SAME mistake, over and over and over again, made me wonder what the hell was wrong with her.
In any case, I pushed through this book to the end. The writing was good, the structure was good, the story was meh, and I skipped a huge amount (really, who reads a split-column biography that interrupts a story for god’s sake?), but I still finished it.
And I finished it because of curiosity. So, regardless of all of the utter failings of Jenna Jameson personally (which, let’s be honest, is the only reason I couldn’t put up with more of her life), this book was pretty good. I’m sure that if I had far lower standards, I would have really enjoyed this book.
Essentially, though, Jameson’s personality is as superficial and plastic as her body. That in itself should be an allegory.
A must read post: [BOOK REVIEW] How to Make Love Like a Porn Star http://t.co/VqR3vwC1 via @biodagar