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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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