Book vs blog: where to stick the juicy details?

I’m usually not one to read the latest in the never-ending series of books all best described as “I Was A Sex Worker Despite The Fact That I’m An Educated, Middle Class White Woman”, but I did pick up Audacia Ray’s Naked on the Internet, mostly because the book promised to be about a lot more than titillating the audience with the story of a girl next door gone bad, and because I know Ray is too smart to waste the audience’s time with “am I a feminist?” hand-wringing. She’s had a lot of experience navigating these waters as the editor of $pread magazine and as an all-around sex and sex work blogger at Waking Vixen. The battles over whether or not there’s feminist potential in porn* have reached an impasse, and so Ray basically doesn’t address the issue in the book, instead choosing to treat it as an overview of all the various ways that women use the internet for sexual purposes, from dating to looking at porn to peddling it to outright prostitution to blogging about sex and dating, as well as a bunch of other uses.

This opening paragraph to Pandagon’s interesting and thorough review of my book got me thinking a lot more about the tell-all impulse, and the ways I’ve indulged and resisted it in my writing. When I was interviewed by Reverend Mitcz for his show Aural Salvation in Los Angeles, he said he was disappointed that I didn’t tell a lot more juicy details about my life and my personal history of sex in the book – other folks have remarked that for a book about sex, written by a sex worker, the book isn’t very dirty.

There are two basic reasons I didn’t make my tell-all story the cornerstone of my book: I didn’t want to, and I’ve been doing that on my blog for the past three plus years.

Ok, maybe that’s an over-simplification, but not by a whole lot. I didn’t want to make my own story the center of my writing because I felt like that was overly self-indulgent. Being the author of a book makes me default expert anyway, and I didn’t want to abuse that privilege by prattling on about myself when other people’s perspectives are at least as interesting (if not more so) than my own. When you’ve got personal experience in and around the subject you’re writing about, this is a tough call though – and one I’ll continue to have to make, with possibly different results, in future writing projects. The line between positioning oneself in a piece of writing and being all navel-gazing douchiness is a fine one. And anyway, navel-gazing is what blogs are for!

I mean, I know I’m a total blog nerd, but I’ve liked doing what I do on my blog. I don’t necessarily think that a book is a better or more important way to tell my own story. Furthermore, the idea of having to give my lived experience a narrative arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end makes me kind of queasy. Life isn’t like that, and I think the act of turning my life into a book story would radically change how I think of my life, and in some ways would change the fabric of what my life is, and not in a good way. I much prefer to unravel my life online in a somewhat informal and entirely flexible way. I think I would certainly lose something in the re-telling and bookification of it all. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I’m older – 27 is a bit young to be writing a master memoir narrative of my life, I think.

Maybe I’m crazy to think that the Internet is just as important as books, but in a slightly different way. I don’t think that the online writing and processing I’ve done about my life is throwaway stuff, nor does it need to be duplicated in book form. I’m probably giving myself too much credit, but I think the book and blog read in tandem are interesting. Separately is good too, but I don’t think I need to do the same exact things in different writing spaces.