Books Where the Sex Worker Is the Main Character
There is a particular kind of book where a sex worker turns up, gets about nine pages, and is then murdered so a detective has something to feel complicated about. She is scenery. She is the reason somebody else has an arc.
This list is the other kind. Every book here has her as the main character, telling her own story, making her own decisions, and surviving her own mistakes rather than somebody else’s. Some are three hundred years old. Some are memoirs. A few are mine and I will say so.
Books with a sex worker as the main character
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Published in 1722, which surprises people. Moll works as a prostitute and a thief across a long and eventful life, and Defoe lets her narrate the whole thing herself, using her wits and her charm to claw her way toward security. It ends in repentance, because 1722, but the repentance is thin and the relish is thick. Three hundred years later it is still the template: a woman explaining exactly how she survived, with very little apology in it.
Nana, Emile Zola
1880, Paris. Nana grows up in the slums, has a brief and genuinely terrible career as an actress, and then becomes the most famous courtesan in the city. What makes it worth reading now is that Zola is not really interested in condemning her. He is interested in the men who destroy themselves over her, which puts her at the centre of the book and everybody else in orbit. Bleak, funny in places, and much more readable than its reputation.
The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber
The best novel on this list. Sugar is nineteen, working in 1870s London, extremely well read, and spends her spare hours writing a violent pornographic revenge story about men. She is clever, calculating and completely alive on the page. If you only read one book from this list, this is the one, and it is long enough to disappear into for a week.
The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, Belle de Jour
Started as a web diary kept between 2003 and 2004 and published in 2005, back when nobody knew who was writing it. The author turned out to be Dr Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist, which caused a certain amount of spluttering in 2009. It became the TV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl with Billie Piper. It is dry, unsentimental and often very funny about the logistics of the job, which almost no fiction bothers with.
Whip Smart, Melissa Febos
A memoir of four years working as a professional dominatrix in a midtown dungeon while she was a student at The New School. Febos is a serious writer and this is the least comfortable book here, because it is honest about the parts that were fun and the parts that went wrong at the same time. Read it when you want the real thing rather than the fantasy version.
And then there is my stuff
Mine are comedies, which puts them in a different register from everything above. What they have in common with the good ones is that nobody on my list is a warning label. She is the one talking.
The Chronicles of a Proud Prostitute
The title is the thesis. My narrator has zero shame and total clarity about what she does and why, which is a rarer combination in this genre than it should be. She is not rescued, she does not repent in the last chapter, and the book never once treats her as a problem to be solved. Gonzo, filthy and much angrier underneath than it looks. Read the summary.
Honey’s Happy Ending Hide-A-Way
Honey Belle Hargrove trained to be a psychologist and ended up running a small unconventional business in a crumbling Tennessee strip mall instead. The joke of the book, and the reason I am fondest of it, is that she is doing the job she trained for anyway. Men arrive wanting one thing and leave having confessed something they have never said out loud. She is the most competent person in the building. Full story here, or read the summary on Amazon.
From Sunday School to OnlyFans
A girl raised inside one very narrow set of rules finds out exactly what she is worth outside them. The money arrives a long time before the peace does, and the book is more interested in that gap than in the earnings. Funnier and sadder than the title suggests, which is true of most things with that structure. Read the summary.
One that nearly fits
I Married a Fluffer Girl belongs on a lot of my lists but not honestly on this one. He answered a Craigslist ad for a hundred dollars and left with a wife, and he narrates it. She is the sex worker, he is the protagonist, so it fails the one rule this list has. I am mentioning it because it is the book people expect to see here, and because pretending it qualifies would be the exact thing this post is complaining about. Read the summary.
Where to start
If you want a genuinely great novel, The Crimson Petal and the White, no contest.
If you want the real job rather than the literary version, Whip Smart or the Belle de Jour diaries.
If you want to laugh and still like her at the end, Honey’s Happy Ending Hide-A-Way.
And if you want the version with no moral attached anywhere, The Chronicles of a Proud Prostitute.
One honest note
Mine are explicit comedies and the older books on this list are not comedies at all, so do not go from Zola to me expecting the same experience. What they share is the thing I actually care about, which is that she gets to be a person instead of a lesson.
If you want more of mine in that vein, funny erotic books is the spicy end and stories of the odd and unusual is the tamer one, or browse the full catalog.
