I Am Jennie

June 18, 2012
A self-excoriating, fairly raunchy memoir from a former porn star recounts her struggle to come clean and change her life, despite the powerful lure of money, sex, and drugs. Known in the adult entertainment industry as Penny Flame since she was a college freshman at San Diego State University, Ketcham entered the Pasadena Recovery Center in 2009 as part of the motley celebrity crew for the reality TV show Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, where she went by her real name for 19 days and found the experience excruciating but transformative. While “Penny was not a real person and could disappear,” she writes with a smarting frankness, “Jennie could be stalked, captured, and hurt, all very easily.” Her bits in recovery alternate with chapters that delineate very explicitly how she gradually moved from taking off her clothes for photo shoots for, among others, Hustler and Cher to girl-on-girl sex scenes and the hardcore boy-girl videos that brought porn-star recognition and raked in money for her, promptly spent on drugs and a fancy car. Lying to the men in her life became an enormous problem, and Ketcham reaches back to her memories of childhood growing up in the California suburbs with divorced parents and a heavy-drinking mom to trace patterns of promiscuity brought on by intimacy issues. Directing her own movies for one of the porn outfits, Shane’s World, helped her gain a sense of autonomy. Ketcham’s unflinching, clear-eyed desire to be “a normal girl with realistic dreams” rings with a vulnerable poignancy.

June 1, 2012
A former porn star's account of her disillusionment with the industry and quest to forge a new identity. This is the type of book that tells all and says little. In his introduction, addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky praises his former patient's bravery and candor in sharing her story. However, Ketcham's insistence on seeding her narrative with pornographic vignettes may be candid, but it is not illuminating. In fact, nearly every sex scene obscures more than it reveals. For example, the book opens with a profoundly unsexy play-by-play of a sexual encounter with another woman described with such clinical detachment that it's impossible to tell whether Ketcham was being paid to participate. To some extent, this confusion is the point. The author claims to have felt real desire almost as often as she faked it, which makes it difficult to maintain a distinction between her lovers and the people with whom she was paid to have sex. Her paid work was at least occasionally thrilling; having sex with certain unpaid partners was artificial and joyless. Rather than examining these potentially fruitful distinctions, Ketcham blithely glides over them, leaving readers more often bemused than enlightened. Her inability to distinguish between real and fake compromises her writing as much as it did her love life, and she often appears to be an unreliable narrator: Can parents who regularly abused alcohol and drugs in front of their children accurately be characterized as "not abusive?" Ketcham is obviously a spirited, intelligent and painfully earnest young woman who wants others to learn from her mistakes, but her understanding of herself and the world around her is too limited to make her story instructive.

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