Hannah Sward, Strip

As a man, I’ve had an uneasy relationship to strip clubs. As an underage drinker, sneaking into the Karlyn Lounge on the outskirts of my small Pennsylvania town, I was titillated by the spectacle of local girls baring their all to a soundtrack of pounding, Top 40s rock. And as I aged into my twenties, strip joints, though not a frequent destination, continued to, well, arouse.

By my thirties, however, something had changed. One of my fellows in a recovery program asked me accompany him to a strip club on Albuquerque’s East Mesa (which, apropos of not much, is a pediment, not a mesa). The guy had, he informed me, tried to eat the business end of his .38 the night before, but the bullet had proven a dud. Click, but no KAPOW. And now he wanted to watch naked women.* The idea, probably, was that having me along would discourage him from drinking. In truth, I’d have accompanied him anywhere that evening, just to see he made it home unperforated.

But seated at our indifferently wiped table, I felt uncomfortable, an effect that intensified when a barely clad blond oozed our way and commenced to gyrate to the dance music that poured from the club’s PA system, her groin inches from my face. My problem was not one of prudishness—I was not offended. Rather, I couldn’t bear to go full lizard brain in front of this undulating stranger, though full lizard brain was the state she sought to produce. More, I could not relinquish that sort of control in view of my friend, the wait staff and the other dancers, not to mention the crowd of sad sacks who’d paid their cover in order to sit at those grimy tables and participate in what is surely the most inadequate substitute for intimacy that exists on this spinning rock.

And speaking of those sad sacks, I couldn’t bear the possibility that I might be mistaken for one of them.

So I looked away, which made things worse. It turns out that the only thing more embarrassing than lasciviously ogling a near-naked woman in front of a bunch of strangers is pointedly not to ogle her. I snuck a surreptitious glance at my watch—how long, I wondered, before we could leave?

I’ve rarely felt so alienated as I felt sitting there, saddened for this hard-working young woman in this joyless circumstance, for her confederates, for the unhappy-appearing men for whom this was the best the night had to offer. Strip clubs, with their farcical pantomime of actual human connection, their bottomless, unrequited neediness, turn out to be some of the saddest places on earth.

Nothing in memoirist Hannah Sward’s Strip discourages me from this view. Abandoned by an, erh, free-spirited mother to be raised by her father, the poet Robert Sward, the young Hannah transacts her childhood in an atmosphere of not-exactly-benign neglect, a seeming afterthought to Sward pere’s quest for spiritual enlightenment, geographic restlessness, and succession of female partners—temporary and variously willing “moms.” More than once, this laissez-faire approach to parenting delivers the child Hannah into the clutches of sexual predators. Summers are spent in the bohemian world of her mother, whose need for male companionship authors another form of neglect. Yet it’s in her mother’s Florida home that Sward forges her life’s most consistent relationship—that with her half sister, the somewhat ostentatiously named Rilke.

There’s a common view among progressive Westerners (among whom I count myself) that a parent’s primary task is to help his or her children to “find themselves.” That’s good as far as it goes. On the other hand, that paradigm for parenting has been the go-to for self-absorbed parents from Australopithecus onward. In Sward’s case, it lands her as a young adult in a strange city without marketable skills or the ability to soldier through an eight-hour workday. With rent due and an empty larder, an escort gig provides the most obvious remedy. Predictably, stints as an exotic dancer and lap-dance dispenser, as well as more prostitution, and drug and alcohol addiction—all the grim appurtenances of the commercial sex trade—follow.

As a dancer, as a stripper, Sward has the looks but, unlike half-sister Rilke, doesn’t have the moves. And there is the relentless pressure to stay thin—a task made easier by a line of crystal meth. And then another. And another. Until those lines stretch to infinity.

Through all of this, though, Sward writes. And her parents do, at last and with varying degrees of intent, come through—her mother financing her return to college, her father bequeathing her a powerful love of language. Ultimately, and in fits and starts, Sward does find herself. One only wishes that her path had been an easier one, although that easier path would have resulted in a less gripping memoir.

Hannah Sward’s Strip is fearless, unstintingly honest, and rendered in English that’s less lyrical than conversational—language employed by real people divulging real, and oft painful, things.

So should Strip be on your reading list? Oh, hell yes.

Strip lands on the shelves on September 6. Preorder it at your local bookseller or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that donates a portion of its profit to independent bookstores. (No one, but no one, loves the written word as much as the men and women behind the counter at your neighborhood bookshop. Let’s keep that in mind when we pop for our next book. Jeff Bezos has more than enough of your money.)

* Over the years, I’ve come to doubt the truthfulness of this tale. Bullets are pretty reliable. Like as not, he just wanted company while he ogled the wares at the local titty bar.