CHARLOTTE SHANE DISCUSSES HER MEMOIR PROSTITUTE LAUNDRY, IN CONVERSATION WITH ANN FRIEDMAN

Prostitute Laundry 

In the winter of 2014, writer and sex worker Charlotte Shane sent out her confessional letter to a small but devoted mailing list. In the months that followed, readership grew to over 5,000 subscribers who followed her candid, unstinting, sometimes heartbreaking meditations. Word spread quickly, garnering the project recognition from outlets such as The Washington Post and NPR.

This intimate investigation is one young woman’s best attempt at understanding her own rich, conflicted life, and the forces that act upon it. The collection is a thoughtful serial memoir about love, sex, money, and identity—how those forces can break us, and how they can make us whole again.

Praise for Prostitute Laundry 

"Every form of writing has an author whose work helped define it; for TinyLetter, that author is Charlotte Shane. I don’t think anyone understood what a TinyLetter really could be until Shane began her Prostitute Laundry series in February of 2014 . . . It felt like reading a novel in serial form, spiked with the knowledge that these experiences were drawn from someone’s daily reality. And then, there’s the prose, which is absolutely hypnotic—intimate, confessional, and even self-scouring in a way that’s unspeakably rare." — Brooklyn Magazine

"Her writing . . . is in turns incisive and tender, embracing human frailty with bracing honesty". — The Establishment

Charlotte Shane is an essayist and author best known for her lyric personal writing, which garnered national attention when distributed in the form of her letters-turned-book, Prostitute Laundry, which The Guardian likened to work by Charles Dickens, and Vice called "addictive [and] intimate." 

Ann Friedman is a freelance journalist who writes about gender, politics, technology, and culture. She is a columnist for New York magazine and theLos Angeles Times, and a contributing editor to The Gentlewoman.  She also co-hosts the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, makes hand-drawn pie charts, and sends a popular weekly email newsletter. Find her work at annfriedman.com.