Asa Akira is a porn star. But more than that, she’s a writer.
This became obvious soon after I started reading Akira’s new memoir, Insatiable: Porn – A Love Story.
I was reading the book because I wanted to write a piece about how repetitive and dull pornography is. It’s more about circus acts than real passion, and I could think of nothing worse than pushing through a couple hundred pages of bad prose describing “adult” movies. I was going to say that other books about depravity at least sometimes had the redeeming quality of a sense of shame and even strong writing – like Junky, the classic memoir of drug addiction by William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was a drug addict, but he also had the decency to feel embarrassed about it.
But then I read Insatiable. And it could not be denied: With the exception of one flaw, and it’s a big one, Asa Akira is a gifted writer. Her sentences have humor and nice rhythm, and she gracefully reports powerful scenes. While her stories about making sex movies are boring – indeed almost catatonically clinical – the ones about her life and childhood are understated and even beautiful. She’s no William S. Burroughs, who learned to write with Jack Kerouac, but she’s no James Patterson either.
When she was a teenager Akira was arrested for shoplifting and had to spend the night in jail. Here she describes walking to her cell:
To get to the women’s side of bookings…the guards walk you past a few cells on the men’s side. There were around fifteen men to a cell, some of them sitting in the back, others right up against the bars, yelling for things like water and food, or complaining about the temperature. They weren’t talking to each other; they weren’t really even talking to the guards. No one was paying attention to them; they were just yelling out to the atmosphere. As we walked past, I couldn’t help but feel like we were walking through a zoo. It smelled disgusting, it was loud, and the air was chilly but thick. I didn’t belong there.
This is Hemingwayesque: a soulful minimalistic tone coupled with sharp observation. If only the entire book were like this. There is a real sense of wasted potential when you read Insatiable. Here is a smart, talented writer who will never be taken seriously because she threw her life away making dirty movies.
And that is the truth that Akira cannot bring herself to admit; and that denial is her great flaw as an artist. Akira can zero in on the truth about a lot of things, from the personalities of her friends and husband Toni to the health hazards of her job. But she can’t come to honestly deal with how she got into the business. She was a smart kid growing up among the wealthy in New York, and the next thing you know, it’s shoplifting, prostitution, drugs, showtime.
How did it happen? We aren’t told. But there are hints. In one section Akira describes sitting in a hot tub with two friends from the porn industry. High on drugs, Akira tells them that she has a vague memory of an adult babysitter sexually abusing her when she was a child. Then, as quickly as this startling memory is brought up it’s dismissed, and we’re quickly back to the circus show.
This is heartbreaking, both for the state of Akira’s soul and for her wasted potential. Great writers are also fearless at self-assessment, whether it’s Hunter Thompson shocked by his own hangover face in the mirror or Joan Didion delving into the depths of her pain in The Year of Magical Thinking. Akira becomes jubilant when describing the sex industry, cheering it as something she just “always loved” and “always wanted to do.” But whereas in Junky William Burroughs always admitted that it was a basic lack of motivation to make something of himself that led him to drugs, and that the life of a junkie is more desperate and dull than exciting, Insatiable will only tangentially touch on why Akira got into “adult” movies.
There’s this passage, where Akira describes arriving in the small town where she shot her first movie:
I stepped off the bus. It had been a three-hour ride, and I was groggy from the last twenty minutes, in which I had finally been able to fall asleep. Looking around, I didn’t see Travis or Gina. It was cold as [expletive], even colder than the city. Gray, empty, and quiet, this was definitely smack in the middle of…nowhere. One single donut shop, a parking lot, and nothing else in sight. The only noise was the wind, and the occasional car that drove by. It struck me as the kind of place that might produce a lot of guys named Don. Hardly anyone had gotten off at this stop with me.
What a remarkable book Insatiable might have been had Asa Akira maintained this tone throughout. It hints at a central sorrow at the heart of her story, a sorrow that her frantic exhibitionism is desperately trying to eradicate.
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