In her early 20s, Charlotte Shane quit her women's studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results.

Shane uses her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions. As she takes stock of her relationships--with clients, with her father, with friends, with married men, and later, with her own husband--she tells a candid and haunting tale of love, marriage, and (in)fidelity, as seen through the eyes of the perpetual "other woman."

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