While I was greatly entertained by the over-the-top tropiness of this book, something wasn’t quite working for me here. My hunch is that this novel has been constructed around scene ideas rather than characters. It builds its chemistry by forcing two complete opposite types into proximity. The characterizations are, from page one, pushed to comic extremes. The heroine: WASP-y! Rich! Uptight! Wears the same nightgown she’s had since she was 12 even though she’s rich! Blushes at the existence of sex! Provides her new roommate with a laminated sheet of rules for the apartment where he’s lived longer than her! The hero: porn star! Disorganized disaster! Eats frozen waffles straight from the freezer! His only talent is fucking! Inexplicably resembles a guy in a Caravaggio painting while constantly eating Doritos and never working out!

The character are over the top, so are the scenarios in which they find themselves, and it’s intentionally constructed that way – this novel is out here having a good time with these fun characters and situations. A game of “what if” has been played to form the plot: what if the heroine googles the hero’s porn while lounging on the couch wearing a skimpy nightgown? What if the porn star hero walks in on Clara at the exact moment his sex groans are being emitted from her laptop? What if she confessed to him that no man has ever made her come, and he decides to fix that for her? What if the gaffer tape on the porn set they are running was applied incorrectly, and they have to block out sex positions to fix them, and he gets hard? What if they decided to wank together without touching each other – for science, of course? And those scenes are, for the most part, fantastic and fun. But the tropey scenes are definitely the primary thing, while the characters are more like trope archetypes reacting to said situations, rather than dimensional people.

Because in light of the characters as we are informed about them, a lot of things happen that don’t make sense? Why does Clara stay in a shared house with a random roommate when it’s clear Everett (the guy she moves to L.A. to pursue) is going to be gone on tour all summer? If she’s a trust fund baby chasing this guy, why not chase him to where his band is touring if he’s what she’s really after? If she needs a car to get to her new job, can’t she lease one instead of borrowing Josh’s precious vintage car? She has the financial means to do so. If she has a normal 9-5 schedule, how come she offers to take the car only at Josh’s convenience – surely that’s impossible if she has to be at work on time? If Josh’s whole thing is making porn that’s appealing to the female gaze, don’t those women already enjoy porn? Why would they need an OMGYes type website to figure out their own pleasure, and why would they be interested in content aimed at women who’ve never consumed porn, especially if it’s not starring Josh? The “I like to watch Josh Darling’s porn” and “I have never consumed porn and don’t know how to make myself orgasm” crowds are two completely different audiences. Anyway. Obviously, Clara stays in the house because that’s the plot, she doesn’t get a car of her own so she can crash Josh’s car so we know he loves her more than he loves his car, and they make the porn website together to demonstrate how woke she is about porn yet how innocent she is about porn at the same time, and so they can mutually masturbate For Science. Much as I enjoyed those plot points, I felt like there was a way to construct them with much less handwaving and “because Reasons.”

And yes, this book is very sex-positive, and the adult performers are for the most part treated like people, so yay for that. A side-plot involves taking down one of the Big Bads of the porn industry, though I could’ve done with less “we’re going to fix the porn industry by taking out a baddie” plotting and more, “here’s a few vignettes of abusive stuff that goes on all the time, and here’s what our porn company is doing to not be abusive in those ways.” Because fixing the entire industry’s tendencies towards exploitation and silencing by legally scapegoating one company just doesn’t seem all that realistic. For most of the scenes involving creating the porn website’s content, the privileged perspective is that of ingenue Clara. Her shock and discomfort at being on the set of a porn shoot is centered, rather than the performers themselves. It’s nice that Josh is there to comfort her in her moment of panic attack over a performer’s on-set masturbation, but I wish Clara had intentionally put herself more in the background of those scenes, watched, and listened and learned, rather than having to be comforted from the trauma of witnessing live erotic content. It was very much about the effect porn has on a poor innocent rather than the performers themselves, who are in a much more vulnerable position.

I know that, for a mainstream audience, the plot must be that the hero gives up starring in porn to be with his one true love. And I also know that doing the whole “I never really wanted to be in porn” trope would come off as pretty insensitive to performers in the industry who do enjoy making porn. But there’s a whole lot of Josh-centric post-porn career questions I have: If he truly enjoys various aspects of creating porn, like the exhibitionism of being watched, and figuring out what gives various women pleasure, and it seems like he does love those things, do those needs or enjoyments disappear simply because he’s with Clara? That’s really not worked through at all, and I wish it were. Honestly I wish we were culturally ready for a mainstream rom-com in which monogamy was not a given, in which a porn star could go on continuing to do porn while loving their partner, in a way that explored the difference between sex as visual performance and sex as a private act of intimacy. We are not there yet, and the author doesn’t have to take us there on her own- this is a rom-com, not a manifesto. But a girl can dream.

Back in this book, Josh thinks about Clara as though she were a trophy or possession a lot of the time. Here’s how he thinks of her desirability: “Every toy that was too expensive at Christmastime. Every sports car he’d ever salivated over. Every ounce of approval he’d never earned.” I guess it’s potentially validating to be treated as a shiny trophy when you don’t consider yourself a prize. But women are compared to cars and other objects in unfavourable ways all the time by misogynists, so even when it’s channeled into praise, I struggled with the comparison being made at all because women are not objects. Josh also considers Clara’s uptight chasteness as a “challenge,” in a way that is off-putting. “You’re like an untapped gold mine. Waiting for some guy…or girl….to come and discover you[…] you’re a challenge.” That places Clara’s lack of experience and lack of sexual easiness on some elevated plane where she’s somehow better than porn stars because she’s more undiscovered, even if that’s personal to Josh here? His language is very “virgin territory being marked” rather than “you have a lot to offer somebody (regardless of experience) and you’re sexy,” a less chastity-privileging sentiment. And finally, Josh is a niche star with a whole lot of women lusting after him, which does give him a certain form of power. He constantly puts himself down as inferior to Clara in a way that seems to devalue his own accomplishments as a performer and successful moneymaker, and seems oddly sex-negative.

It also bothered me that there was so much sexualization of Clara’s nudity in the scene where Josh helps her shower. In this scene, she’s injured and relying on his help. I know it’s just a North American thing to think of nudity as inherently sexual, but we collectively need to get over this, maybe with mass lifedrawing lessons or something. Because context is everything. If someone is naked in front of you, they aren’t presenting themselves to you sexually if it’s (for example) a drawing lesson, a nude beach, a changing room, and especially not if they require your care and in a vulnerable position because they’re relying on you to provide that care. By the time of this scene, Josh has already slept with Clara, they are mutually into each other, and we’ve established she wants him, all of which is mitigating. But it still irked me that he couldn’t primarily focus on how not to hurt her bruising while washing her, instead of on his own boner.

At the book’s conclusion, there’s a whole lot of tying up loose ends in a manner that feels pretty trite. Clara goes chasing after her longtime crush Everett at about the 90% mark. We haven’t even met this man, we don’t care about him, and we know Clara doesn’t feel about him the way she feels about Josh. She didn’t need him physically in front of her to come to the correct conclusion about their relationship or to gain closure, because their friendship hasn’t been demonstrated at all. In another final-act maneuver, Josh reconciles with his mom, to whom he hasn’t spoken since he told her he was doing porn. It turns out there’s literally no good reason they didn’t talk for two entire years because she’s basically fine with it?! This plot glosses over common realities of the stigma against adult performers, to make it seem like it’s something that can be overcome in exactly one conversation instead of something that has to be worked through. The book’s also really heavy on family togetherness in a way that isn’t always a good idea IRL. Clara is encouraged to go back and make peace with her family, who are mostly in the background stressing her out about her life’s choices all the time, rather than being supportive in any way other than financially. While she’s reliant on their money, I wish striking out on her own apart from their trust fund were an option for her.

There’s also several heavy-handed lessons doled out to the reader. Clara’s entire PhD effort keeps getting put down as inferior to her porn company founding, because she was HIDING from the world in academia and AFRAID to make her own art when – analysis is its own very worthwhile thing? There’s no need to compare scholarship with creative endeavors as though it’s a zero sum game, because they are essentially different pursuits. Clara also goes on about how HOLLYWOOD has told her that if she just keeps chasing the guy of her dreams, he’ll come around. But she and Josh have spent the majority of their non-porn-focused bonding time watching action movies. Other than a passing remark that she doesn’t mind the occasional period drama, she doesn’t seem that into romance-focused content? She’s also 27 years old; surely she knows that Hollywood style romance doesn’t always play out that way from her experiences as a human being and member of a large, scandal-prone family? It was a bit “this book here is so subversive because NOT HOLLYWOOD PLOT” but that seemed like a bit of an overstatement.

So those are my longwinded nitpicks of this book. A book which I found this compulsively readable and entertaining, for the record. Even when my critical brain was quibbling about characters, plots, and moralizing in my notes, I was intrigued to see how the story would play out. The author is certainly talented, and I’m interested in checking out her future work to see her growth as a writer.

Originally published on Goodreads on June 1, 2021