How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: An Epic to Rival Homer’s Odyssey (You Know, If Homer Had Written About the Porn Industry)

A Review By: Amelia

Is it just me, or do porn stars have the most interesting lives to read about? For me, other biographies just don’t compare: sleazy politicians, doped up rock stars, sex-crazed diva movie stars–porn stars are all these things wrapped up into one surgery altered, self-hating package and well, that just makes for good reading! Everyone wants to hear others dirty secrets, the salacious details of their lives that make you both nauseous and intrigued, well in Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, you get more than enough details to leave you cringing and disgusted but dying to hear more!  

Now, for those of you who don’t know, Jenna Jameson (born Jenna Marie Massoli) is a former porn actress who has been called ‘The Queen of Porn’. Jameson was drawn into the dangerous and seedy underbelly of Las Vegas by a boyfriend–a world where rape, drugs, and murder are commonplace–and, at the tender age of sixteen, she stays put. Pressured into becoming a stripper and leaving her much-loved family, Jenna’s life begins to spiral away from her. However, her addictions, her hardships, and her degradation led her to her meteoric rise to fame as the world’s biggest porn success story.

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star is not just the story of Jameson’s porn career, it follows her

throughout her whole life and even goes into great detail about her early childhood and her family. You learn all about how she originally wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a Vegas showgirl, how she was raped multiple times, how she suffered through her crack addiction and an abusive relationship with her sleazy biker boyfriend. Jameson has been through more in her life than most people would go through in several and it makes for a very interesting, humorous, and often heartbreaking book. It also includes dozens upon dozens of photos of Jameson as a child, a stripper, a porn star, and everything in between. A warning though that some of the pictures will leave you in an awkward position should you read the book in public and a little old lady sits down beside you!

Jameson also does some really out of the ordinary things with her autobiography. Her life story isn’t necessarily presented in chronological order of when it happened, which is out of the ordinary–at least from an autobiographical standpoint. She also disperses interviews with her father and brother throughout the chapters and they discuss things like how often they got it trouble with gangsters and the law alike. Jameson also tosses in a few lists in the style of ‘The Ten Commandments’ and, by far the most entertaining bits of the book, lists that have been animated into comic strips. The woes of a stripper is hilarious and will leave you wanting to read it over and over again; I often found myself flipping away from the last chapters of the book to go back and read it just once more.

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star is an epic. An absolute epic. It’s an autobiographical book that goes beyond anything I’ve read before. Jameson went through physical abuse with multiple rapes and a demanding job at a seedy strip club. She went through emotional trauma with her biker boyfriend. She fought through a devastating addiction and the porno business and still came out on top of her life. Her backstory made an amazing story, and the overall design of the book only made it that much more compelling and enjoyable.

My final thoughts on Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star is that it is a fantastic autobiography. It’s an absolute gold mine of information on the porn industry, on Vegas and its seedy underbelly, and of Jameson herself. If you’re not put off by some of the more disgusting details she includes in the piece (one especially gross one being the amount of blood on the sheets after she lost her virginity) then you’ll thoroughly enjoy this book… and the half-naked pictures of Jenna Jameson don’t hurt!