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Diary of a Married Call Girl promised to be a novel full of laughs, love, money, marriage, sex, lies and cheating. It delivered on about half of those.
The quasi-autobiography of Tracy Quan shares with the reader some of the problems a married call girl in New York faces. The core of the problem, other than being a prostitute, is that her high-profile banker husband doesn’t know about her career. She has to live a double life, avoiding her husband and his family while maintaining her working relationships with fellow prostitutes and her customers. She masks her business by only making appointments in the day, checking her e-mail and voice mail only while she’s alone, keeping her old apartment (while sub-letting it to another working girl), and pretending to be taking French classes. The funny thing is that her husband never really shows an interest in what she’s doing during the day.
There are lots of sex scenes in this book. And I mean a lot of them. But other than that, there’s no real motive to the book. It comes off as bland and tasteless with no real emotional content to it. There are places that will cause a reader to chuckle, but there’s nothing overly funny occurring, either, which is a shame. A book about a woman who sells sex for a living and is good enough to live very well, but has to keep it a secret from her husband, is full of potential. It could have explored the reasons behind choosing a life as a sex worker beyond the token excuse of a young girl running away from home. It could have been turned into a comical farce of the first order. Instead, what the reader gets is Quan attempting to disguise her own life story behind a thin veil of fiction. It just didn’t work for me.
