1. Lauren recalls her first time performing as a stripper at the Kit Kat Club, and discusses the common societal attitudes about why people become sex workers. Lauren writes, “What makes one financially strapped girl turn into a stripper and another into a Denny’s waitress and another into a med student? You want to connect the dots. You want reassurance that it won’t be your daughter up there on the pole. Shitty relationship with my father, low self-esteem, astrologically inevitable craving for adventure, dreams of stardom, history of depression and anxiety, tendency towards substance abuse --- put it all in a cauldron and cook and the ideal sex worker emerges, dripping and gleaming and whole.” Discuss the common stereotypes and misconceptions about sex workers. Does society oversimplify why people become sex workers? How has Lauren’s story altered your own perceptions about sex work?

2. Lauren explains, “Nevertheless, two roads diverged. I picked the one that seemed a bit wilder. Because that was who I wanted to be.” Discuss how our personal choices reflect our identities. Do we choose who we ultimately become?

3. Describing the harem’s power dynamic, Lauren writes, “All the girls were transformed in some way by the pressure, the paranoia, the insidious insecurity that creeps in when you size yourself up against a roomful of other girls every night. Who would you be? Would you shine or would you buckle? Would you stay and slug it out or would you run?” Describe how the harem’s competitiveness begins to affect Lauren. What would you have done in Lauren’s place?

4. As a very young girl, Lauren has an idealized image of her birth mother, who was a ballerina. Lauren explains, “in my fantasy, my birth mother was a life-size version of the tiny dancer twirling inside my satin-lined music box. My plastic ballerina had the smallest brushstroke of red hair and limbs the width of toothpicks. She never lost her balance; she never had to let her arms down. I imagined my birth mother posed in a perpetual arabesque, swathed in white tulle, with a tiara of sparkling snowflakes in her hair.” How did Lauren’s perceptions about her birth mother match up to reality? Do you feel there was a sense of disappointment? How did the meeting change Lauren’s feelings towards her adoptive parents?

5, After meeting her birth mother for the first time, Lauren writes “I was only twenty, the age Carrie had been when she put me up for adoption. And when I chronicled my list of outrageous fuckups in the preceding couple of years, when I visited my dismal graveyard of buried aspirations, when I looked at all I had trampled, I was forced to forgive her.” Do you believe Lauren’s forgiveness of her birth mother was justified? Has there been a time when you forgave someone in a similar situation?