Pretty Baby: A Memoir by Chris Belcher

The title of this fascinating memoir stems from the fact that the author, Chris Belcher, took first place in a baby beauty contest in her working-class West Virginia home town of 1,600. Her life after that has been unusual as she worked her way through a PhD program in English at the University of Southern California by pursuing sex work and branding herself as LA’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix.  “Chris Belcher's Pretty Baby reminds me why I fell in love with memoirs in the first place. Sentence by knife-sharpened sentence, the personal history she examines makes space for both the ferocity of her past selves and the resonance of who she is now. With wit, seductive candor and a willingness to question the very answers she used to swear by, Belcher doesn’t just hand us her story; she demands that we interrogate ourselves in the process.” —Saeed Jones. “Pretty Baby is an unflinching, layered exploration of sexuality, queerness, and power that isn’t afraid of gray areas or contradictions,