I'm not very close to my parents. My stepfather (in my opinion) was very emotionally abusive when I was growing up and there were a lot of other issues I don't feel comfortable talking about publicly. I spent a lot of time in therapy dealing with these issues though, and I feel i'm finally starting to move past them.

I feel like people think of me as someone who really believes in a sex as empowerment philosophy, like Sasha Grey or something, when actually I feel like I'm much more what a lot of liberal feminists would call sex negative than most women I know.

I first emailed Tao Lin a story I wrote about the experience of losing my virginity sometime in April 2011. He didn't respond until it was later published on Thought Catalog, after which he sent me an email that said something very similar to, I enjoyed reading this on Thought Catalog. Good job.

I've never written about a situation involving real people that I haven't directly taken part in. I've never made things up about other people. None of my stories were written with ill-intent towards the other people in them, even though I doubt people will believe that about Adrien Brody.

I think it's sad that we live in a world where men can steal and distribute and publish photos of women without their permission all over the Internet and even in print and make a lot of money doing so, but half naked photos that I took of myself are deemed obscene.

Towards the end of it [working as an escort girl] I could feel myself drifting towards a liquor habit and I had a few minor mental breakdowns due to a what I felt like was a constant chipping away at my personhood (guys thinking I would have unprotected sex with them if they just paid me fifty more dollars, for instance) and a few abusive clients.

As an adult I've connected a lot with men over the Internet. Nothing seems really notable (pre-Adrien Brody) except I went to London in July of 2010 and before I went I had a few men lined up to meet, two who made a large impact on me. Both were mentioned in Adrien Brody.

I'm interested in the female dom/male sub dynamic, and how superficially it can seem like a total reverse of gender roles and maybe even subversive or something.

I started to wonder, and felt relieved that there might be truth to the idea of intellectuals all being frauds. I knew that I certainly was.

I don't have much to say about honesty. All that I feel about it that people don't discuss as far as I know is how much effort it is to create truly honest writing, in my opinion. It requires a lot of thinking and effort.

I admire self-awareness more than probably any other quality, and I think in terms of what qualities are good in a person, it's a mostly subjective opinion, so I can't see a reason to think that self-absorption is inherently a bad thing.

Obviously this all gets tricky/complicated when your writing reveals so much of your private/intimate life, and the nature of writing on the Internet comes with a lot of focus on your personal brand.

What i'm trying to get at is that to me nothing felt glamorous or exciting or sexually liberating about it. I also think the amount of money you can make escorting is exaggerated (it wasn't uncommon for me to see ads for escorts for 40-60$/hr where I live.)

I seem to have made my friends proud of me/proud to know me. I also feel I've learned and grown a lot even in this short time, and this event has given me a lot of opportunity to continue doing so. Obviously there were a lot of negative reactions, but they seem to have overall little relevance to my life.

I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.

I often feel like that with the way I portray myself I come off as looking much worse than any of the other characters. I guess it might also be worth noting that anyone I've had as a main character in a story I've written has had full knowledge that I am a writer who writes about the people in her life.

I guess I'm also obligated to note that the experience of sex workers who are not upper/middle class/white probably have much worse conditions than anything that's portrayed commonly in media/what I experienced.

There's just something off about equating the act of spending three years writing a book with the act of someone exploiting themselves by drunkenly flashing the camera for Girls Gone Wild or something.