Girlvert: A Porno Memoir

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She portrays porn as an industry full of abusive sleazeballs and druggie degenerates, but she's also quick to point out when someone she met while working went out of their way to treat her kindly or respectfully. What struck me interesting is that it can be any type of job where you have to perform - and the strain of keeping that lifestyle or drug use up just to make it to the next day or even moment is a fascinating process. One thing's for sure: it's certainly graduated from its niche status as the pastime of oily, pervy Buddy Hackett types to become a load-bearing column in the temple of our zeitgeist. The Nervous Breakdown"Oriana Small has pushed herself to the outermost extremes of what the body and mind are capable of--all before turning thirty years old--and now she's made it an authentic read for the rest of us to marvel at, elevating the depravity and denial inherent in the pornographic arts to a singular literary experience.

This makes the parts of "Girlvert" where Oriana finally learns to assert herself even more inspiring. Only in porn would a person’s wretched habit of shoving her hand all the way down her throat be considered a talent.And it raised the question, is it still rape if she gets a handful of money thrown down next to her afterwards? Given both the cover art and the subject matter, my expectations weren't high, but Oriana Small (a/k/a Ashley Blue) sure exceeded them.

She offers a peek into an industry and lifestyle that the mainstream publicly decries as aberrant and sick.If Asa Akira's memoir suggested that porn was a healthy way to channel her worst impulses, Ashley makes the case that doing porn, at its best, was a jarring, but ultimately effective, form of therapy.