"Antonia Crane's writing is bold and beautiful and glimmering with light." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
"Spent is the sex worker memoir I've been dying to read for years. It's a startlingly brave, alluring, moving and empowering journey of a woman who dares the world to break its own heart. I've been a huge fan of Antonia's writing for years and this bold, wild debut grabbed me from start to finish." —Jill Soloway, creator and executive producer of Transparent
"Antonia Crane is a gift. Her writing will change how you look at the world." —Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries
"Antonia Crane puts you right inside the places where people put things inside other people's places. It's very intimate, what she does. And she writes funny. Plus, she doesn't tell you how you should think about sex for money, when it seems like everybody wants to tell you how you should think about it. Sexy, honest, funny, subversive, counterintuitive, she's also just a great old-fashioned storyteller. Spent will leave you spent, in the best sense of that word." —David Henry Sterry, author of Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent
"Spent is an extraordinary memoir by an extraordinary writer. This is as much a story about the enduring love between a mother and a daughter as it is Antonia Crane’s unpretentious depiction of life as a sex worker. Brutally frank, and at times shocking, Crane is no sensationalist, choosing instead empowerment over victimhood, strength over self-pity, survival over self-destruction." —James Brown, author of The Los Angeles Diaries
"Antonia Crane steps into the eye of her own hurricane to tell the raw, reckless story of her life as a stripper, sex worker and addict. Crane’s elegance is in her gaze: her life inside others’ secrets, and her almost anthropological wonder divulge so many buried truths about desire, desperation, and longing. Ultimately, Crane’s own longing leads her back to her dying mother’s bedside, and to her worst challenge. Spent is a beautiful, heart-pounding memoir of daring adventure and self-discovery, of a woman living at the edge of her boundaries." —Julie Greicius, Senior Editor of The Rumpus
"Smart, courageous, quick and seductive—like Marguerite Duras on Meth." —Moby
"Being naked on the page can be a kind of performance, but Antonia Crane doesn’t settle for what’s showy. She digs deep into the mysteries of the human heart, then deeper still, with the kind of honesty I find inspiring. I’ve never seen her on stage, but if she’s half as gifted a stripper as she is a writer, I bet she sets the house on fire." —Sy Safransky, editor and publisher of The Sun
"Antonia Crane is the X-rated Simone de Beauvoir of the S&M set, a worldly-wise, hysterical, seen-it-all, done-more-than-you-imagined-in-your-most-depraved-fantasies veteran of real-life sex-work, and she has survived—in style—to turn it all into the amazing, beautiful, wild-ass ride that is Spent. This book is so good it should charge by the hour and make you pay up front. I really loved it." —Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and OG Dad
2014-02-02
Revelatory, unapologetic life story of a San Francisco stripper and sex worker. Crane, a university writing instructor and Los Angeles blogger, writes nostalgically of her solitary youth as an energetic, restless "chunky" girl growing up in Northern California. Her father, a lawyer, abandoned the family when she was 10; as a teenager, negative body image issues manifested into bulimia. But it was her mother's abusive post-marriage relationship that forced her to move to San Francisco on her own at 17, posing nude for artists while subsisting on "a diet of meth and oranges." Her bisexuality emerged alongside a slow descent into drug abuse, which parlayed into dancing at a colorful assortment of San Francisco strip clubs catering to generous, fetishistic patrons. After a suicide attempt, Crane found the strength to attend substance abuse recovery meetings. With pride and exhilaration, she discusses her time pole dancing as "Lolita" and "Stevie," as well as her activist involvement in the country's first strip club unionization; the author does not express shame for a livelihood borne out of necessity and fascination. Crane even straddled sex work with a stint as a youth counselor, but when her mother became debilitated with cancer, she and her brother compassionately came to her aid and bestowed a dying wish in an excruciatingly sorrowful scene. However, she again yielded to the call of the street, traveling from Los Angeles to New Orleans. There's a gripping emotional current coursing through Crane's often startling material; the urgency and brazen honesty of her storytelling is difficult to ignore. Definitely not for the sheepish, Crane's graphic life spent navigating gritty gentlemen's clubs and massage parlors doesn't end with catharsis but with unrepentant contentment. A raw, searing self-portrait.
