Undressing the Stripper Memoir

Over at DoubleX, cultural critic Katie Roiphe analyzed the bestselling genre of the stripper memoir, an unromantic look at a titillating bookshelf.

The essay outlines nine conventions that play out over and over in these books, perhaps laying the groundwork for a theoretical better stripper memoir. Among others, the essay looks at Diablo Cody‘s “Candy Girl,” Ruth Fowler‘s “Girl, Undressed,” and Lacey Lane‘s “Confessions Of A Stripper.”

Here’s a sample: “It is puzzling that such promising and prurient subject matter would lead to such flat books. This stylized form of sexuality seems to lend itself to cliche. In all of these memoirs, there is something false in the revelation and mechanical in the execution, that is–if we take the word of these bored and jaded ladies–something like stripping itself.” (Via Raquelita)

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