Allie Rowbottom didn’t set out to write a book about porn.
The Malibu-based author of the memoir “Jell-O Girls” and the novel “Aesthetica” had an idea for her next book: an epic novel set in 1960s Laurel Canyon, about two singer-songwriters who were friends and rivals.
“I had Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill as the templates for the two characters, but I was getting kind of bored,” the author says. At the same time, Rowbottom was listening to Lili Anolik’s podcast “Once Upon a Time … in the Valley,” which tells the story of Traci Lords, who performed in adult films before she turned 18.
“Obviously, the music industry would give me a lot of opportunity to talk about the things I’m interested in as a writer, like women’s agency, women’s empowerment, and how those forces can exist with its structures that are predicated on disempowering women,” says Rowbottom. “But the porn industry just felt like all of that was way closer at hand.”
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That led Rowbottom to shift her story from singer-songwriters to adult film performers. In the novel “Lovers XXX,” Jude, an 18-year-old from a small town, goes to L.A. in search of her best friend, Winnie. Jude falls in with an older man who convinces her to rob liquor and convenience stores for drug money before she makes contact with Winnie, who is working at a strip club.
Jude gets a job at the club, and pivots from dancing to making pornography, much to the chagrin of Winnie, who later enters the adult video world herself. When a scandal rocks the L.A. porn scene, Jude disappears, and years later, Winnie decides to find out what happened to her friend.
Rowbottom answered questions about her book via telephone from her home. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q. What made you decide to set the first part of the novel in the early 1980s?
In my fiction, I’ve found that I am compelled by technology. My last book, “Aesthetica,” was about Instagram, and this book is obviously about pornography, but the early ’80s were this moment of technological change, and porn, especially now, is always on the forefront of technological change. And it just felt like the early ‘80s was a big turning point for the industry, and ergo, for the performers. It was a moment where the promise of money and empowerment, particularly for everyone in the industry, but particularly for the female performers, was high. There was a lot to be gained by doing adult films with the rise of VHS and the democratization of pornography, people being able to watch it in their living rooms.
It meant that there was more money and that people were buying these tapes in numbers, so there was real financial gain and real stardom — promised, anyway — for the female performers. I wanted to get into that because it’s those sticky and often contradictory nexus points of empowerment and potentially oppression or objectification or image culture that are so interesting to me, how multiple truths can co-exist in those spaces.
Q. The early ‘80s were also the time of Andrea Dworkin and Women Against Pornography as well as the Meese Report, people on opposite sides of the political spectrum both opposing porn. How did you manage to include all these threads of these feelings going around during that era without seeming to land on one side or the other?
I knew from the beginning that it wouldn’t be pro- or anti-porn. It just seemed so beside the point to me. As a novelist, I just don’t feel like that’s the point of fiction. I think it’s to look at an issue or time or character from multiple perspectives and ask questions. I myself am not pro- or anti-porn. Porn is such a huge cultural force. It’s too big for that. It’s too omnipresent. And, of course, it’s a very hot-button issue for people, as I found out publishing this book.
One of my biggest editorial challenges with this book was including that historical context without including too much and hitting the reader over the head with it. I had more material about the Meese Commission. I had a little bit more about Women Against Pornography. It began to feel a little academic, so I had to pare it back a little bit. But I always think that with fiction, I don’t want to moralize. I want to invite readers who might have a disposition to moralize themselves about certain subjects to look at them from a different perspective, and maybe just ask questions about their own preconceived notions, specifically about women and about these characters.
Q. How did you go about researching what the porn industry was like in the early ‘80s?
There’s actually a lot of great material out there for this time period. I started with Lili’s podcast, and then from there, I started reading some memoirs by adult performers, not just Traci Lords, but also Porsche Lynn and Jenna Jameson. And I read “The Other Hollywood” by Legs McNeil, which is a 700-page book that’s just transcripts of oral testimonies from adult stars talking about different time periods, but mostly pre-internet. And there’s another great podcast project by Ashley West, who’s sort of a porn historian, called “The Rialto Report” that’s just adult performers telling their stories, people like Christy Canyon, Ginger Lynn, Porsche Lynn, Amber Lynn. There’s a lot of Lynns.
It blew my mind because, not that I would have assumed that they would have had negative experiences, but they all really insisted on how much they loved their work, and I just found that really interesting and exciting as I researched. Obviously, these are performers who’d had pretty positive career trajectories, and there were a lot of people who didn’t have that. So I wanted to honor that there were specifically women who had had a great time and really profited off of their career in adult film and felt empowered by it and felt like their lives had gone great. And then there were people for whom that was not their story.
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Q. Do you think it’s accurate to say that there are feelings between Jude and Winnie that go beyond the platonic, whether it’s one-sided or mutual?
That was definitely something I was thinking about when I was writing it, and yes, especially in the first part of the book, they’re so young that I think the intensity of friendship at that age, the lines between platonic and romantic become kind of blurred, at least in my experience. I somewhat wanted to leave it a little vague as to the revelation of their friendship’s meaning to both of them at the end.
I think that there is a romance, even if in some ways it’s only just the romance of a true, deep, soul friendship and what that ultimately means as one moves further along the road in one’s life. Especially for women, relationships with men come and go, but a lot of the time, the most enduring relationships are with women. So there’s definitely a romantic element, and how that logistically manifests is left unsaid and up to the reader to think, “What will happen after the end of the book?”