I think in certain ways sex work has been romanticized. I can only speak from my experience, but what surprised me about escorting was how boring it mostly is. it seemed like an assembly line process of cleaning my apartment, dressing up, making awkward small talk, having mundane mechanical sex, making more awkward small talk, and then closing the door after them. There's also a lot of frustration and annoyance with it that I feel isn't discussed (a lot of flaky potential clients for instance.)

I feel like people think of me as someone who really believes in a "sex as empowerment" philosophy, like Sasha Grey or something, when actually I feel like I'm much more what a lot of liberal feminists would call "sex negative" than most women I know.

I started to wonder, and felt relieved that there might be truth to the idea of intellectuals all being frauds. I knew that I certainly was.

I often feel like that with the way I portray myself I come off as looking much worse than any of the other characters. I guess it might also be worth noting that anyone I've had as a main character in a story I've written has had full knowledge that I am a writer who writes about the people in her life.

There's often times a big difference between what you actually thought/felt in a situation and what you think you thought/felt. You have to do a lot of work to make your thoughts/feelings possible to be understood by other people. It's very draining, though also cathartic.

I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.

I recognize that memory is far from infallible though. If I feel like I can't accurately describe something, I just leave it out. I also do things like write "he talked about ..." instead of writing direct quotes. But generally I feel like since my stories are very obviously meant to be my perception of an event rather than the objective truth this gives me a lot of leeway.