It’s 1982 and eighteen-year-old Pearl steps off the bus onto Hollywood Boulevard, looking for her best friend, Joan. When she finds her at Ladies of the Valley, a strip club known for its connections to the adult film industry, the two embark on an epic adventure through the golden age of pornography, culminating in a disquieting mystery Joan must unravel.
Told in the two-part structure of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies and bearing the nuanced feminism of Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room and the epic romantic scope of Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Ladies of the Valley is a richly layered exploration of life lived inside the shadow cast by adult film stardom, long after that stardom has faded. It’s a story of sexual identity forged beyond binaries, feminisms and taboo, a story that takes readers on a journey from film to video to Pornhub, all the while asking: what becomes of the actors who give their bodies to the performance of sex? Above all, Ladies of the Valley is a love story like none other between two ardent, vulnerable and revelatory women.
Allie Rowbottom is the author of the novel Aesthetica and the memoir Jell-O Girls, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection, Amazon Best Book of the Month, Indie Next Pick, and Real Simple Best Book of the year. Allie’s essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon, Lit Hub, No Tokens, NY Tyrant, The Drunken Canal, Alta Journal, Bitch, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Jon Lindsey.
It’s 1982 and eighteen-year-old Pearl steps off the bus onto Hollywood Boulevard, looking for her best friend, Joan. When she finds her at Ladies of the Valley, a strip club known for its connections to the adult film industry, the two embark on an epic adventure through the golden age of pornography, culminating in a disquieting mystery Joan must unravel.
Told in the two-part structure of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies and bearing the nuanced feminism of Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room and the epic romantic scope of Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Ladies of the Valley is a richly layered exploration of life lived inside the shadow cast by adult film stardom, long after that stardom has faded. It’s a story of sexual identity forged beyond binaries, feminisms and taboo, a story that takes readers on a journey from film to video to Pornhub, all the while asking: what becomes of the actors who give their bodies to the performance of sex? Above all, Ladies of the Valley is a love story like none other between two ardent, vulnerable and revelatory women.
Author
Allie Rowbottom is the author of the novel Aesthetica and the memoir Jell-O Girls, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection, Amazon Best Book of the Month, Indie Next Pick, and Real Simple Best Book of the year. Allie’s essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon, Lit Hub, No Tokens, NY Tyrant, The Drunken Canal, Alta Journal, Bitch, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Jon Lindsey.
