"My Life In Pornography," Part 1: "A Girl's Best Friend"

From the end cred­its of A Girl’s Best Friend, Henri Pachard, 1981

My Life In Pornography is the title of a mem­oir I com­pleted in the sum­mer of 2012. Its first sec­tion, titled “A Girl’s Best Friend,” about the mak­ing of the motion pic­ture of that title, is now pub­lished on Thought Catalog. You may read it here. 

The book, which I’d been mess­ing around with in some form or oth­er since the early 2000s, has five parts. The second part, titled ” ‘Goin’ Through The Motions’ ” is about my rela­tion­ship with Susan Merchant, later Susan Walsh, and con­tains a mis­ad­ven­ture at a live sex show. Susan, a fine writer and a dear friend, dis­ap­peared in 1996; iter­a­tions of her story have been told on two dif­fer­ent tele­vi­sion series, Unsolved Mysteries and Investigation Discovery. The third part is called “Meet Dick Filth” and recounts a trip to Las Vegas with David Foster Wallace, Evan Wright, and Nathaniel Welch to cov­er the AVN Awards in 1998, and the edit­or­i­al chal­lenges that ensued a little there­after. Part Four is “The Connoisseur,” about my par­ti­cip­a­tion in the motion pic­ture The Girlfriend Experience. It is a different—less jovial—account than the “set diary” pub­lished by MUBI in 2009, a piece that had ori­gin­ally been com­mis­sioned for GQ by Dan Fierman and ulti­mately rejec­ted by editor-in-chief Jim Nelson. The fifth and final sec­tion is called “Documentation” and wraps everything else in a man­ner that one read­er com­plained was “too post­mod­ern,” but I like it and I’m keep­ing it as it is until some actu­al edit­or talks me out of it, or something. 

Why pub­lish this sec­tion now? Well, after see­ing the New York Times fea­ture on the DVD label/film dis­trib­ut­or Vinegar Syndrome titled “Smut, Refreshed For A New Generation,” and  then learn­ing of Williamsburg ven­ue Nitehawk Cinema’s “Nighthawk Naughties” series of mid­night shows, which kicked off with a screen­ing of Radley Metzger’s 1976 The Opening of Misty Beethoven (from which my Erotic Connoisseur quotes a line in GFE), I thought, “Well I’ve had a pretty good retro-porn tale on tap for a few years now, why just leave it lying around?” Obviously I am also hop­ing to gen­er­ate some interest from edit­ors and pub­lish­ers. But mainly of course I’m doing it for YOU, my readers…well, yeah, actu­ally why else, right? I hope you enjoy it and I do hope the oppor­tun­ity to get the whole thing out there in dead tree form and/or oth­er­wise arises soon.