A vivacious chronicle of how Mazzei channeled her sexuality into a lucrative business, which became an epiphanic experience...
A former internet live-action “camgirl” divulges the secrets and the snags of the provocative lifestyle.
In Mazzei’s debut memoir, she describes growing up in Santa Monica, California, as the daughter of a hip, bipolar cinematographer and an alcoholic makeup artist. After an earthquake and subsequent fire damage forced the family to relocate to Colorado, they thrived until her mother’s addiction became unmanageable. From a young age, Mazzei’s biggest desire was to be the center of attention, and, almost as a diversion from her home life, she attracted attention by being the “strangest girl in middle school,” embracing a seductive alter ego, “Isa, Queen of Boys,” and seducing her male classmates. Later, the author also began exploring different aspects of her sexuality, including an attraction to women, sex work for wealthy men, and a stealth introduction to “camming.” Mazzei writes about her online adventures with a self-assured, casual flow and never skimps on the details of her racy, erotic two-year tenure as a camgirl. She explains how she developed a unique, arousing identity named “Una” and began amassing donated “tokens” from fans for her increasingly sexual group and private room virtual interactions. Readers interested in the fascinating world of online chat-room hosts will get a fully guided tour courtesy of Mazzei’s intimate, interactive broadcasts. Her early on-camera fumbles with tangled garter belts and random insecurities (“was I really going to masturbate in front of three hundred strangers?”) gave way to a dominant yet playful online persona whose content’s intensity increased as she networked with other girls and promoted her cam profile page on Twitter. Mazzei ended up creating a mini empire for herself and banked thousands of dollars. Only in the concluding chapters does the author openly reveal her lifelong issues with self-control, anxiety, and depression, which resurfaced during a mental breakdown at the height of her cam business and contributed to its closure.
A vivacious chronicle of how Mazzei channeled her sexuality into a lucrative business, which became an epiphanic experience as well.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64428-035-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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