One of my favorite reading experiences of my life was Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. I read it in the months between graduating college and starting grad school, an amorphous time when I had no immediate plans or responsibility, in my childhood bedroom, compulsively, pulled along by the taut thread that is McNeil and McCain’s magical ability to construct narrative out of interviews. Later, I decided to read The Other Hollywood, their book about the history of the porn industry. I grew up in the era of third-wave feminism, and figured The Other Hollywood would reiterate all the things I’d been told: sex work is a way to be in charge of one’s body, a way of subverting the system, and that participating in it didn’t mean you were emotionally damaged but instead indicated sexual liberation.
The Other Hollywood is not that story. Instead, I was shocked at how completely and utterly fucked-up the early porn stars were. They made Sid and Nancy seem well-adjusted. The book is full of violence, betrayal, lies, and the desperation to do anything to get ahead.
This is the world of Lovers XXX (Soho Press, June 2026), Allie Rowbottom’s third book and second novel. Winnie and Jude are best friends and troubled teens, living unglamorous lives in an unglamorous part of Los Angeles County. Winnie runs away to L.A, and later, Jude goes to find her. They get jobs in a strip club and then transition to porn. It’s the early ‘80s and the industry is figuring out how to pivot to VHS. The two of them succeed, becoming stars. There is glamor and money and drugs, but also crabs and lube and dicks that feel like “fucking a mop.” And that success is shaky; it comes with the knowledge that it only takes a few years for the industry to consider you “old,” that the people who like you today might not like you tomorrow, that your sense of control might be nothing more than a ruse.
Structurally, the book is unusual but uncomplicated. We get two halves of the same story: first Jude’s account, and then Winnie’s—but the timeframe does not overlap identically. Jude’s version takes place in the early ‘80s, while she’s a sexy young porn star. Rowbottom taps into the addictive cycle of excitement, excess, and horror that is the reason why such rise-and-fall narratives are so popular: Scarface, Blow, Boogie Nights. Winnie’s half is told (mostly) as an older woman who is trying to sort out the past, and thus we get to see how the choices we make when we’re young affect us when we are older. What is it like to be casually buying groceries while a man recognizes your hot and horny 20-year-old likeness through your current, 50-year-old form? Even pre-internet, porn never dies.
The split perspective also functions as a method of building suspense. In Jude’s half, the source of this suspense is: How does Winnie truly feel about her? In Winnie’s: Why has Jude disappeared? There are other things left unanswered the first time around—motivations, explanations, the video that is Lovers XXX. The effect both clarifies and distorts that slippery thing we call “the truth.”
In Jude’s account, a boyfriend named Laird takes up a significant chunk of the narrative. He is older and the kind of man who only seems desirable if something is wrong with you (I say this from experience). Laird keeps returning in the book—intruding on Jude and Winnie, and again at the end, briefly, in Winnie’s portion. I wanted him to go away. Partially, I wanted to warn Jude to get away from him, but partially, I found him to be a less-than-compelling character, a “deadbeat guy” trope. The other supporting characters – like Cherry, the older porn star who, in Jude’s eyes, is the pinnacle of success; or Brad, the strip club owner who leads the girls into porn – feel fully fleshed out, and the Laird scenes felt like a slog in comparison. But later, we see that including the twists and turns of his and Jude’s relationship were necessary for a few different plot points, which is a strength of the book. All the ingredients need to be there to advance something, whether that something is character or theme or plot. (Still, I would have liked less Laird.)
Rowbottom’s writing throughout the book is glorious, particularly in her descriptions of Southern California. I grew up in San Diego, and LA is the city where I’ve spent the most time but never lived. She perfectly encapsulates its beauty, the beauty that sometimes comes in spite of itself:
“…all strip malls, wilting palm trees and wild bougainvillea… Graffiti in shades of purple and pink popped from gray concrete in the lowering light…Spray-paint artists and celebrity lookalikes. Boys with pompadours and jean jackets, sunglasses that turned their eyes to mirrors. Girls with feathered hair and teased bangs, the way they sauntered in shoulder pads, sipped Coke cans with Revlon-red lips.”
It is a city, as Rowbottom writes, filled with “so much natural beauty mixed with human mess,” that makes lesser eyes unable to see how incredibly fucking gorgeous it is. And Rowbottom writes about L.A. with the same lens and tenderness she uses to write about porn, with neither judgment nor rosy glasses.
Because even though Rowbottom’s depiction of the 1980s porn world is damning, it is not judgmental. These girls are exploited and used, they are damaged, but making porn, for them, is also an escape. In this book, porn is like anything else; it is not inherently good or bad, it simply is. It just happens to attract people who are more comfortable living outside the bounds of society than, say, waitressing.
The book’s title and cover present it as tantalizing, lurid. It is wrapped in a modesty cover, hiding the spines of porn videos, which show a woman’s shapely ass, a woman’s shapely legs, and a woman’s shapely underboob (kudos to Luke Bird, the book’s designer—the physical object of the book couldn’t be more perfect). The book is frequently divided in sections named after the various videos the girls appear in – Perverted Pool Party II, Masked Medieval Fuck Fest, Wild Cuntry. There is even a Penthouse letter, written by Winnie, featuring “rosebud” hard nipples and “sex” that drips with juices (Rowbottom was obviously enjoying herself while writing this section—it’s hilarious). The book fulfills its promises in that regard. But slowly it becomes clear that all this sex is hiding something much more tender.
The video Jude and Winnie appear in that is called Lovers XXX is teased early, mentioned only abstractly: “Plumeria, pestemon. Roses…No drugs necessary.” We know that “For many years, Jude would not watch the film. For many years she would not allow herself the memory of its making, the memory of its name.” Based on this description, it is hard to tell if the experience of creating this film was a good one or a bad one. Jude could want to forget it for so many reasons. It is not until the very end of the book that Lovers XXX is fully revealed, and its depiction shows this is not a book about sex at all. We see that porn can be desperation and exploitation but it can be love too, and the love in Lovers XXX (the video, but also the book) is so strong that it possesses a purity. Purity! In porn! It is emotion that drives this book more than anything else. And this is why the book hit so hard for me.
My teenage years were delineated by degrees of mental instability and different friendships. There was Sarah, then Michele, Leslie, Carrie, Amy, Brooke. Girls I loved, and for each, the love was differing in type and temperature. I trusted Leslie the most. My love for Amy was the least complicated. Sarah was the one who reminded me the most of Winnie and Jude.
Sarah was beautiful, with perfect glowing skin and eyes like orbs. When she wore smoky eyeshadow, I couldn’t stop looking at her. We spent so much time together but there was something in her that was unknowable. I felt jealous of her frequently—her effortless coolness, her recklessness, her family’s wealth, the way boys noticed her. My jealousy caused me to betray her, in small ways and then in larger ones, but she was sent off to some religious bootcamp somewhere, maybe in Utah or maybe it was Mexico, and by the time she came back, I had switched schools and felt so guilty from all my betrayals that I never sought her out again. Years later, we were briefly friends on Facebook, but she never responded to my messages. My love for her was lost to time. I can remember the way I felt about her, an intense love complicated by my own self-hatred, and the way she’d do and say certain things that made me feel sick to my stomach. I loved her, I wanted everyone to see her the way I saw her, I wanted nobody else to look at her, I wanted to snuff her out. In some ways, she saved me. In some ways, she hastened my own self-destruction.
Like my love for Sarah, Jude’s love for Winnie is possessive. She wants to own her, she wants “all Winnie’s time [to be] solely devoted to her.” She wants “inseparability” and “utter enmeshment.” When she can’t have this, she turns to betrayal, first small and then spectacular. If they were normal teenage girls doing normal teenage girl things, this betrayal would have been the type of thing that causes a few months’ rift before the two girls got over it and become friends again. Or maybe they’d realize they didn’t actually love each other as much as they thought.
But, because everything in Jude and Winnie’s reality is so precarious—their housing, their star status, their security— the stakes are higher and the results of a betrayal are more dangerous. The aftermath causes Winnie to tell Jude she will never forgive her. And Jude takes her at her word.
In Jude’s perspective, we can’t tell how Winnie feels about her. Jude’s love for Winnie is intense but complicated, reflecting Jude’s sexuality, which is “not so easily classified” and more about “bodies than souls.” Oftentimes, Winnie seems to find her annoying or creepy. This is another element of suspense throughout the book: is their love real, or are they merely clinging onto each other for survival? It is only once we are in Winnie’s perspective that we see the love flowed both ways, and how utterly stupid Jude was for doubting it. Winnie tries to dissuade Jude from making the leap into porn. In Jude’s perspective, this comes from jealousy and judgment. But in Winnie’s, we find out this comes from wanting to protect her. Before Jude was in LA, Winnie filmed porn while still under 18, and it resulted in a horrific experience.
Despite the extremity of their situation, the tragedy of their friendship is so common that we’ve made it into a cliché: there is nothing more important than communication. Because the two girls are unable—too fearful, too young, too unaware of their own emotional make-up—to communicate, their love fails. We see that both of them are wracked with guilt for the failings of their friendship. In some ways, Jude and Winnie save each other. In some ways, they hasten their own self-destruction.
I judge books in two ways: how much they make me feel, and how much I think about them afterward. Rowbottom’s book succeeded on both counts. It made me feel depressed, disturbed, and ultimately cut open, not by depravity but by its incredible tenderness. And I thought of it so much after because Jude and Winnie felt so real to me, like people I knew in real life, as though they existed in my memories and not just in a book.
I love a good novel that allows me to weep silently in bed as I read it next to my sleeping husband. This book did just that, making me think about and re-feel one of the great complications of my life: the deep love I felt for my friends when I was Winnie and Jude’s age, the way these friendships shaped my life, and how this love was twisted sometimes by the ugly emotions of being a human that I was too young to manage healthily or even understand. The book’s strengths – plot, structure, character, sentences – combined with its emotional intensity show Rowbottom’s adroitness as a writer. The book is not just a technical success—it has heart.
great review!!
I am incredibly honored by this beautiful review. Thank you 🥲❤️