Book Review: Stormy Daniels's memoir: Funny, vulgar, brash and believable
By Jill Filipovic
September 21 at 8:00 AM
Jill Filipovic is a journalist and a lawyer, and the author of “The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness.”
Stormy Daniels would like to set the record straight, and the first thing she wants you to know is that she didn’t want to be here. She hates public speaking. She kept the bad sex she had with Donald Trump a secret, even from her husband, and even after some of the people she loves most in the world begged her to come forward to save the republic. She’s not a gold digger or an attention seeker or a bimbo looking for her 15 minutes. And she’s definitely not a liar.
That is the current that runs through Daniels’s new book, “Full Disclosure,” which publishes Oct. 2 (The Washington Post obtained an early copy). Daniels knows we’re all interested in the juicy bits about Trump, but she doesn’t get there until several chapters in, after detailing a dysfunctional childhood in Louisiana with an uninterested and then absent father and a mother who falls apart as a result. She is repeatedly raped at age 9 by a child molester, and when she finally tells a school counselor, her story isn’t believed. Her mother pretends it never happened, fearing that the assaults will be blamed on negligent parenting. Hers is a childhood marked by indifferent and sometimes callous adults, and she has to prove her basic worthiness again and again.
Daniels eventually finds solace in horseback riding, which helps her pull away from a life that felt inevitable, a theme she comes back to many times as she considers the absurdity of her current situation (“I should be living in a trailer back in Louisiana, with six kids and no teeth,” she writes in the book’s prologue, as she instead prepares to accept the keys to the city as West Hollywood proclaims Stormy Daniels Day). Her fixation on riding means she avoids drinking, drugs and sex, all parts of a normal teenage social life, but things that can short-circuit plans of escape for those lower on the socioeconomic rungs. “I would see yet another girl who lived around me suddenly pregnant and would say to myself silently, Can’t ride a horse if you’re pregnant.”
That focus also animates Daniels’s professional life, as she starts stripping in high school (focusing on consistent clients rather than gravitating to one-time big tippers), moves on to more-profitable stripping road shows and then tries the adult-film industry. She seeks to write and later direct adult films, and finds quick success.
She is ambitious and bright, and that comes through — she doesn’t just show us, she tells us, repeatedly mentioning that she graduated from a magnet high school, that she has a photographic memory and that she’s smarter than you think. She misses few opportunities to emphasize the loyalty of her fan base — even more so now, as so many people plead with her to save the world as we know it. She name-drops and self-promotes and says how good she is at the many things she does well. As she recalls conversations, she’s always the one shutting down her adversary with a perfect zinger (or what she thinks is a great zinger but a younger reader will interpret as a classic mom joke, if your mom cursed a lot, liked bad metal, and named her boobs Thunder and Lightning). She implies that she was somehow preordained for the prominent history-shaping role she currently occupies.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/stormy-danielss-memoir-funny-vulgar-brash-and-believable/2018/09/20/03f0dc6c-bcf3-11e8-8792-78719177250f_story.html
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