INSPIRATION / ROB URBAN
Asa Akira
The page
is hers.
A familiar name.
A voice worth spending time with.
Being known about and being heard are different experiences.
Asa Akira’s account of writing her first memoir makes that distinction feel personal. Here was someone accustomed to being watched, discovering a new kind of exposure in putting her thoughts into sentences.
In a 2014 conversation with Royal Young for Interview, she described feeling so shy while writing that she could not do it with another person in the room. Judgment of her words felt more intimate than judgment of her appearance.
I find that admission moving. Confidence has a geography. A person can know one part of it very well and still feel uncertain stepping into another.
Akira stepped into it anyway. That is where my admiration for her as a writer begins.
BEFORE THE WORKDAY
6 a.m.
Time for the
next sentence.
There is a wonderfully ordinary detail in Dan Miller’s 2014 XBIZ interview: Akira described getting up at six, writing for an hour or two, then going to the gym and on to work. She drew on journals she had kept and her Twitter posts to help recover memories.
The routine gives the book a different sort of visibility. Before the finished object and the public reaction, there was a person finding time to write.
I like the continuity with the journals. She told Miller she had long enjoyed reading and writing, and had kept a journal without intending it to become a book. The habit had a value before it acquired a public purpose.
That is a generous thing to remember about people with highly recognizable careers. Some of the interests that matter most to them may have been quietly present for years. We arrive at the part we can see and assume it is the beginning.
Her writing routine makes the ambition concrete. The next sentence needed time, and she gave it time.
An account with
room to unfold.
Akira told Young that honesty guided her through the fear of publishing. She wanted to describe her own experience, which differed from some familiar stories about the adult industry.
What I appreciate is the specificity of that intention. A memoir gives one person room to speak in the first person. The reader can spend time with the experience she is actually claiming.
That creates a useful freedom. Someone can be proud of her work and still have moments of uncertainty. She can be funny about herself without giving an audience permission to reduce her to the joke. She can remember an experience differently as time passes.
A label compresses. An essay can unfold.
Akira’s willingness to write gives that unfolding a chance. The familiar public name is now attached to a point of view, with its own emphases and proportions. The author gets to decide which small thing belongs beside the large thing everyone already knows.
The small
embarrassment.
One brief passage in Grove Atlantic’s published excerpts from Insatiable shows how that can work. Akira writes about feeling embarrassed to pay with the one-dollar bills she earned stripping, despite being comfortable with much more public exposure.
The contradiction is the joke. She can be bold in one setting and mortified by something apparently minor in another. Her confidence does not follow the tidy rules an observer might invent for it.
That is a perceptive place to find humor. Most people have some version of an embarrassment that makes little sense beside the other things they comfortably do. The particular detail gives the feeling a shape.
I admire the choice to make herself available to that recognition. There is no need to assemble a perfectly consistent heroine before the reader arrives. The awkwardness belongs in the account.
It also changes the distance between author and audience. A reader may begin with curiosity about an unfamiliar career and find a familiar human inconsistency waiting inside a sentence.
INSATIABLE / DIRTY THIRTY
There was
more to say.
Insatiable was published by Grove Press in 2014. Dirty Thirty followed from Cleis Press in 2016, with essays about turning thirty and subjects including love, marriage, death and celebrity.
I appreciate the presence of a second book. It makes authorship something she returned to. There was another set of thoughts worth arranging and another point in her life from which to look.
The choice of thirty as a vantage point is interesting, too. A birthday can make the relationship between a public image and a changing life especially visible. Other people may recognize the same name while the person carrying it has new questions.
A second memoir allows that movement into the record. The first account can stand, and there can still be more to say. A life continues beyond the version of it that first caught someone’s attention.
That possibility is part of what makes personal writing matter to me. A person can revisit her own story without asking the old summary for permission.
What stays with me is the combination of the shy writer and the early morning. The feeling was real, and so was the decision to keep working.
It is an encouraging picture of creative courage. There can be a part of the work that feels exposed, a part you care about enough to worry over, and still a next page.
Akira’s authorship matters because it gives her perspective a form people can actually encounter. She chooses the details, makes room for the contradictions and decides where the humor lives. A name that people recognize becomes a voice they have to spend time hearing.
That is the invitation I admire. Stay long enough for the person telling the story to become more interesting than the assumption you brought to it.
About the writing
Which books did Asa Akira write?
Asa Akira wrote the memoirs Insatiable, published by Grove Press in 2014, and Dirty Thirty, published by Cleis Press in 2016.
What does this essay focus on?
This appreciation focuses on Akira’s account of becoming an author, her writing routine and the humor in a publisher-provided excerpt from Insatiable.
What did Akira say about her writing routine?
In her 2014 XBIZ interview with Dan Miller, Akira described writing for an hour or two early in the morning before the gym and her workday.
Sources: Royal Young’s 2014 Interview conversation, Dan Miller’s 2014 XBIZ interview, Grove Atlantic’s publication record and excerpts, and the official Dirty Thirty listing. The discussion combines Akira’s own accounts of writing with a close look at Grove Atlantic’s published excerpt.
Written by Rob Urban. Get to know Rob’s writing and consulting.