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No Man's Land |
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| Audiobook: Downloadable Audiobook - Unabridged | 8.26 x 5.23in | 9 Hours | ISBN 9781429537773 | 19 Jun 2008 | Penguin Audio |
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First song, dress on…
“It sounds like an obvious statement when I say that girls don’t grow up wanting to be strippers, but you’d be surprised. Most people – civilians that is – seem to think that even in the cradle we were wrapping ourselves around a greasy pole and grinding our hips to Britney Spears.…When we get drunk the regrets come out. ‘I’m a good girl, really I am,’ sighs one. She takes a drag of her cigarette and I think to myself, I’m not a good girl. Not really. Not anymore. But I sure as hell would like to be.”
With forty-three countries, twelve boats, dozens of flights, a fistful of “life experience” behind her and a lot of ambition fueling her dreams, twenty-five-year old Ruth Fowler arrives in New York City. A Brit with a Cambridge degree and a middle-class background, she doesn’t think it will be too hard to start a new life. But getting a work visa in post-9/11 U.S.A. proves to be tricky, and to kick-start a writing career, Fowler starts documenting her experiences. She funds her efforts with cash-in-hand jobs and a stint writing for The Village Voice, but it doesn’t take long for funds and hope to run out – sending her to the heart of Manhattan's dark underbelly, the strip clubs and “Champagne Rooms” of Times Square. As “Mimi,” she has a chance of survival. But when this persona threatens to consume every vestige of Fowler’s identity, when her life spirals out of control and her true self remains so deeply buried that it seems impossible to resurrect, relying on “Mimi” seems like the biggest mistake she has ever made. No Man’s Land is a shocking, raw account about losing identity—and finding it again.
“Why would a bright young Welsh woman with an honors degree from Cambridge University work as a stripper in Manhattan’s Times Square? The answer, writes memoirist Fowler, is a simple five-letter word: money. In this titillating tell- all, Fowler reveals how a long wait for a visa and frustration launching a journalistic career landed her in the sleazy—and oh-so-lucrative—business of taking off her clothes. From the start, Fowler was able to distance herself emotionally as she danced in the dark spaces where desperate men came to quench their desires. When she stepped onstage, she became sexy, soulless Mimi (a name an acquaintance gave her for her self-centered ways). One day, a handsome, Eton- educated Englishman enters the strip club, and Mimi finds herself performing for a man who would have once been her peer. A romantic entanglement ensues. But is “Eton” in love with Mimi or Ruth? When an article about “Mimi” appears in the New York Times, interest from several book publishers promises Fowler a ticket out of her tawdry life. But it’s harder than she thought to leave the lurid limelight behind. Eyebrow-raising revelations about the sex industry abound in this sharp, racy, and relentlessly candid tale.”
— Allison Block, Booklist
"An absorbing confession that blazes across the page like nightclub neon. Disturbing and intense."
-Elizabeth Brundage, author of Somebody Else’s Daughter
“No Man's Land is a fearless exploration of the murky territory where eroticism and commerce collide. Fowler has lived, scrutinized, and offered up a serious first person narrative of sex and desire, representation and identity, and the perversion of female power. She has refused to play by the rules that govern both life and stories, opting instead to test the edge of her experience and then to write it, honestly and unsparingly. The result is a work that is both courageous and outrageous. In a world where pole dancing is marketed as empowerment, this relentlessly candid book comes as a welcome slap."
--Ruth Ozeki, author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation
"In Ruth Fowler's excellent No Man's Land the Cambridge graduate's dark and harrowing account of her work as a stripper in New York City makes for an interesting inversion of the genre that gave us The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl, Sleeping Around, and Girl With a One-Track Mind. Fowler's excoriating narrative quite effectively undermines perceptions of sex work as a viable form of postmodern female empowerment. While she's by no means advocating old-fashioned values, Fowler's book is dispiriting enough to make you drop out of your strip-aerobics class and return that junior pole-dancing kit you picked up for your daughter...."
-The Guardian (UK)
Listen Up Award
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