This week, in New York’s cover story dedicated to how much money the city’s residents are making now, an anonymous New York Times best-selling author with over 800,000 Instagram followers said they brought in only $49,000 last year. “I pretty much live from a bucket of savings,” they shared, much to Lit Twitter’s horror. Of course, being a writer has never been a sure path to fame or accolades or satisfaction or, in fact, stability of any kind. But today, it’s hard to imagine even the most decorated of authors without a rich spouse, family money, a side gig or three. Those aspiring to a career in writing without one or several of the above are staring down the barrel of a bristling reality: Publish, and you may well perish anyway.
Last month, the novelist Paloma Karr — a pseudonym — published a candid story for Esquire about how the end of her relationship led her to begin working at a legal Nevada brothel. “I had a tough breakup in the dead of winter, when I was in my mid-40s, that stuck me with the full monthly rent for a one-bedroom in Manhattan, where I live,” she writes. She was also working on a “new novel with characters who did sex work.” Although Karr had prior experience as a sex worker, the brothel-ranch world was entirely new to her. After several stints at her ranch last year, she decided she wanted to stay — only to be fired weeks later for working with colleagues to form what could become the first American brothel union. I spoke to Karr last week about how she pitched the piece, what role she hopes sex work will play in her life moving forward, and how her novel is going.
How did the Esquire article come about, and how has the reception been?
I pitched it in late spring to an editor who’d really gotten to know me well through another piece we’d worked on that got a lot of attention. Esquire pays better than a lot of other outlets I have written for, so I did that piece very much for much-needed money. I have several expensive chronic illnesses — plus, due to vocal support of Palestinians and the genocide in Gaza, I had lost a lot of professional opportunities very suddenly.
The response has actually been really positive. I've heard from all kinds of readers. That was great. My ex-boyfriend called me out of nowhere and said his writer group chat was enthusiastic about it. Of course, people who've harassed and doxed me in the past have tried all their old tricks. But I'm focusing on the good.
I look at it as part of a body of work, so that's not the full story of my life at Sheri’s. It was intended to be a look at some of my journal entries from the beginnings of when I worked there, pitched as a celebratory 50-years-of-Sheri's piece. I don't want to pretend there isn't a dark side of sex work. But so often we only hear about the dark side.
I turned in the piece in December. By the last few days of that month, we had been alerted to a bad contract at Sheri’s. Me and many of my friends there were trying to get through to the owners that this contract was unacceptable. I got fired with several other ladies in early February for union activity just 24 hours after we formed the first brothel union in U.S. history. Now we're working with the union and their lawyers and the NLRB to fight our termination and hopefully get our jobs back and to make our workplace better than ever.
Based on The Nation's reporting, the contract does sound completely wack. Most egregious were the brothel's claims to ownership of workers' likenesses and intellectual property. And that it could assert power of attorney over you.
For so many of us, these issues are serious, because we do all kinds of other work. When you think of all the potential for these kinds of things in the world we're in right now, it can get very easily sinister.
Immediately, when my dear friend Jupiter Jetson saw the contract, she texted me and said, "People should not be signing this." We had a whole discussion. I was like, "But Jupiter, I really need this money right now. I'm an activist in so many areas and it's cut me off from many opportunities already." But then I snapped back to my senses. We gathered some of the other ladies for a Zoom call with the union, and by the end we wanted to be part of them. Communication Workers of America is as good as it gets. They were excited to work with the brothel, too. So it was just a dream scenario.
Why did you decide to publish this piece under a pseudonym? Where did the name come from?
Paloma has been a sex-work name that I'd had off and on for a long time. It was really because of a fascination as a child with the French jewelry designer Paloma Picasso — there was a period where her perfume was everywhere.
When I first started working at Sheri’s in April of last year, I did not have my face on the website. I was very anonymous. Then I slowly started creating social accounts for Paloma. Over time I realized that one of the things I loved most about my work at Sheri's was that it was a completely different crowd than the sex-work worlds that I knew in New York and L.A. So it was almost an experiment for myself. I slowly got bolder and put my face on social media. For months it has been up there. Nobody at all made the connection — and if they did, they didn’t say anything — and that really wowed me because it allowed me again to be a proud sex worker and not feel like I have to hide. There is an economic incentive too. When people show their faces, they tend to do better.
I was at a residency over the summer and felt safe among the fellows there. A lot of them were younger and super progressive about sex work. It was magical for me to share readings from my Sheri’s journals because it helped me feel more comfortable. I let people know that I didn't just do this for the writing. This was not me being a tourist and hoping to get a book deal or a bunch of articles. This was a world I went to because I really had to. Last winter, I was back to rationing food. I'd had a breakup, and I had to pay solo rent and I was terrified. I got some emergency grants, but it wasn't enough for me to survive.
I've always written about issues of money, whether from an illness perspective or from a refugee-immigrant perspective. People know these are important issues to me and that I've never lied about not having money, which for Iranians is surprising because they either have money or they have pretended for a long time to have money. I'm from L.A., but I wasn't from the Beverly Hills set. You could say I was lucky enough to not be part of that elite. That gave me more perspective to look at things really honestly.
In the story, you do mention that you're Iranian. How did you decide what identifying information you wanted to include?
These were very careful considerations. Most of the people in the piece are composites in order to protect the identities of ladies on the ranch and clients. Because of the nature of the photo shoot, I knew that people would know who I am to some degree. I've never really been shy about the truth. Why not actually talk about who I am?
Race and ethnicity is a big part of working at a place like this. There's a paragraph about my discomfort about how we talk about clients. We'd say, “The Indian guys are here, the Middle Eastern guys are here.” Race and ethnicity are casually talked about at all times. I had clients who would just see me as a white person and other clients who would immediately know that I was Middle Eastern or racially ambiguous and wanted to talk about that. You have a lot of downtime with clients, and we'd end up talking a lot. At first I thought maybe I could be in a Paloma character the whole time. But as time went on, Paloma became more similar to my civilian self and I became comfortable with that.
Let's talk about those incredible photos. Were they always a part of the project?
Initially I thought the best idea would be a photo essay. There's such a campy beauty to the Sheri’s premises, and I thought a photographer would have so much fun with it. My first editor, who is no longer at Esquire, thought there should be more of my writing, but for me, the visuals were really the draw.
I've gotten a lot of nice comments about them. Being a 48-year-old woman who was disabled for many years, it’s nice to hear. That sounds kind of basic, but for many years I could barely look in a mirror. I guess in the print issue, it kind of looks like a centerfold. That's hilarious to me. Something happens to you at this age where you're like, Really? I look good? because a part of me is just like, How many more years do I have on this planet? I should be preparing for death at this point. I've been plagued with health issues for so long. But again, this is an economic thing, too. Having money to eat the way I need to, to go to the doctors I need to, that already was pretty remarkable for me. Being able to afford a base level of wellness is amazing.
I just went to a doctor yesterday, and she said I looked like I’d “reverse-aged" and asked what I’d done. I wanted to tell her I started making more money because now I'm a sex worker. I've outed myself to some people when I think it's useful. At my age, it seems silly for me not to be fully out, but there's a lot of cultural issues. People in my community as an Iranian and Muslim person — those are the people I worry about. Some of them are very progressive, but some of them are not, and I don't have the privilege of coming from a family that has great politics.
You mention in the piece that you're working on a novel with characters who do sex work. How's the book going?
Really wonderfully. The funniest thing about working at a brothel is that it can feel like a writing residency half the time except that you're getting paid for the sex you're having. [Laughs.] Writing residencies, you do it for free.
I’m joking, because sex work is definitely work, and it was hard work too. I would go two weeks each month and then the two weeks back in New York, I would focus on my reading and writing. But after some months, I started to get to a point where I had more regulars and appointment clients, so I had more downtime and to watch Criterion Collection movies in my room and write.
I got to work a lot on this next book. There is a character that very much resembles me, an Iranian American writer in midlife. She hasn't sold that much, she's not the top client for her agent, she's not the star for her editors, she's aging and making less and less money. She becomes a sugar baby, transitions to being a high-class escort, and then goes into the world of the brothel and becomes “a courtesan." In the book, it's framed as a midlife crisis because it's the first time she's done sex work. Which is different than me. I don't know to what degree this is a midlife crisis for me, but I think that's a funny way for people to look at it. I don't mind funny framings of this, I mind vicious ones.
That's one-half of the book. The other half centers on another version of this woman who has grown up in Iran. So it's a little bit of a doppelgänger thriller. It asks the question that I've always had: What would have happened if I'd never come to the U.S.? In the book, Iran is in a prosperous place, and the U.S. has completely succumbed to fascism, which you could argue we're close to. But in my book the worst has already happened. It's a book I'm really excited about, but I'm really trying to really take my time.
There's also potential for a nonfiction project about sex work, but there's so many great books on sex work already. I want to think long and hard about how to create a contribution that's useful.
What would you say was the biggest surprise in this whole experience?
How it healed my relationship with men. That's in the piece, but I really mean it. I had gotten to the point where I had difficulties interacting with men in my different industries. I was disappointed with how they walked through the world and how they related to the rest of us. The world of the ranch was really different. When men come to these places, they're very vulnerable, and they often show their best selves. I definitely had clients that were terrible, but a lot of them were really at their best, and I could see a beautiful side to them. That to me was really remarkable.
The other surprising part is that normally when you get fired from a job, especially if it's over something like work with a union, usually I'd be like, “I'm done with this world.” But all of us who've been fired and who've been active with the union want to go back to Sheri's and make it a better place. I believe in trying to better that ranch system, because it's a very safe form of sex work. I was getting better medical care there than I do in my real life. We have blood tests and cervical swabs every week. And we use barriers for all forms of sex.
By the end of the story, you decide that you want to stay in this ranch life, but as we know, you're fired shortly after. What role ideally would sex work play for you in your life moving forward?
I've always really looked up to older sex workers. I would love to see how long I can be in and out of this industry. It would be kind of fun to be one of those old ladies who have sailor mouths. It would be exciting to be an old lady who can destigmatize sex work in some of our cultures. I think a lot of white Americans feel like it's destigmatized for them, but it's not always destigmatized for brown people, even though there’s a long history of sex work in our worlds.
But I don't think it's going to be a forever thing for me. I now have a savings account, which I hadn’t had in a long time. It's been a very unstable life for me as a writer. To me, if you can get a little bit of financial security, you can walk through the world much more easily. We'll see what happens. As I always used to remind my students, we're always in the middle of our story.
