Review 185: Sex, Drugs & Being an Escort by Ashly Lorenzana

Sex, Drugs & Being an Escort
Ashly Lorenzana
Copyright © 2010
Amazon Kindle
ASIN: B004C446IC
239 KB
$1.99

I applaud anyone who keeps a journal -whether its handwritten or typed.  I’m pretty good at blogging every day, and have tried keeping a handwritten journal but I always fail. I think we tend to be more truthful when it’s pen to paper, so I expect that Ashly Lorenzana  handwrote much of her true confessions – scattered journal entries she’s now published on Kindle as Sex, Drugs, & Being an Escort.

Ashly is an escort, offering her services on CraigsList before the threat of serial killers finding their victims there caused an uproar and the site shut that portion down. Much of her confessions involve her mother, whom she discovers is also an escort.  She moved to Portland to be closer to Mom, and that’s when she took up escorting.  Unfortunately, Ashly and her mom also have a taste for crystal meth. Therefore, the conflict at hand is pretty obvious.

Much of Ashly’s entries are spent worrying about Mom, getting high with Mom, or taking care of Mom because she’s not very responsible. At times, Ashly seems to be more mature but it appears a constant parade of faithful (and unfaithful) boyfriends come between mother and daughter.  If you choose to read this book, be prepared for the painful truth.  Ashly holds nothing back -when it comes to drug use and Mom.

Unfortunately, her confessions are a bit too scattered.  The reader finds Ashly obsessing a bit too much about Mom’s troubles or about how much her boyfriend loves her, and less time diving into the business of being an escort.  And face it, that’s why you are going to buy this, right?  America loves a good escort story or sex trade confessional, but we expect to get the goods if we are going to be a paying customer – on CraigsList or at Amazon.com.

Instead, Ashly teases us with just minute tidbits of information about “going to work.”  In fact, most of the time she dismisses “work” with just a chapter ending sentence.  Then, it’s back to Mom troubles, or car troubles, or boyfriend troubles, or drug troubles, and the process only repeats itself again and again.

“Sex” should not even be the first word in the title.  The phrase alone is a cliché by now, and for this book, it’s definitely a tease. What is in this book is definitely raw, and perhaps a bit too raw.  Picture yourself finding someone’s journal on the subway or bus and you begin to read.  You don’t know the person and therefore some of what you read might not make sense, but your mind wanders and can start to put the pieces together.

That’s the only problem with diary confessions that aren’t edited and pieced together in proper book form.  Some of the pieces are always going to be missing.

Again, I applaud Ashly for what she has done here and for putting herself out there, raw and exposed.  This is an interesting read, nonetheless.  But in the end, it’s gonna be a long night of just foreplay and your $1.99 is running out.