Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction by Erica Garza

Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction
by Erica Garza
Simon & Schuster, 2018

Erica Garza’s new memoir about sex and porn addiction, Getting Off, is candid, quick, and as structurally clever, as commercially savvy, as it is intimate and sincere. It isn’t an addiction memoir that tries to shock, or to sustain the reader’s interest with long gruesome episodes of lowpoints or shady dealings or binges. What distinguishes the book from others in the subgenre is that it feels, at a svelte 224 pages that traverse 30+ years, like the sort of distillation that comes from a balance, in the author’s mind, of knowing the ins and outs of her topic, and a serious concern for the experience she’s providing the reader.

The cleverness of its structure comes with Garza’s honesty, and not just the appearance of sex but her descriptions of it, her use of sex as a device for hooking interest or manipulating the rhythms of action and prose. We first meet her in a graphic prologue, sex with a tattooed guy she doesn’t know all that well and then some porn binging after he leaves. Then we get to Chapter One and commence with the story of her middle-class upbringing in Los Angeles, a Mexican child who’s made quickly aware of the divide between her own family, her home life, and those of the white classmates with whom she develops co-dependent bonds. In middle school she imitates the fashionable new haircut of a dear friend, anticipating a stronger bond and maybe social promotion to follow, but her friend is mortified by the gesture, the theft of her image, and Garza is prompted – by the ensuing social rejection – to lead a loner’s life, eating lunch with teachers and reading a lot, cultivating the labyrinthine internal life into which she’ll recede, habitually, well into her adult life. It seems like every sexual encounter, every social event, is filtered through a lens of crippling self-consciousness, a performer’s interest in pleasing her companion(s), and the reader gets a sense, through Garza’s mastery of voice on the page, that the gaze she’s training on hardcore pornography, or her companions in a threesome, or her work in New York or a young prostitute in Thailand is the same vulnerable, curious, isolated gaze with which, as a teenager, she met the ridicule of her peers, or the adulation of judges in a pageant, or the first sonogram of her baby sister.

Garza’s candor throughout the book, her anguish first as a teen in search of validation and then as a young adult falling helplessly to her addiction, is powerfully wrought here – is in fact so powerfully and compellingly accomplished that the reader (or critic) might feel a pang of guilt to be approaching the text in search of those graphic episodes and finding, at the same time, that there’s a very vivid and vulnerable person at the center of them, hurting herself. But Garza knows that this is the case, and she plays to it. She never in the whole book strikes a sanctimonious chord, or recounts an affair with remorsefully coy descriptions like “spending the night” or “going to bed.” The sex scenes are sometimes erotic and sometimes disturbing and sometimes both. She’s as interested in telling her story, exploring her past, as she is in keeping the reader hooked, and she presents herself to the reader as both an intimate confidant and a professional storyteller. It’s a brilliant performance.  

An addiction that first appears as co-dependency in girlhood finds an outlet with masturbation in adolescence, and finally with sex and drinking in her late teens and early twenties. Her first two relationships set the model for the roles she’ll play in affairs to follow: submissive, eager to please, tolerant of abuse, or else she’s dominant, cold, helpless to a strange desire for hurting her partner with some random cutting remark (especially when booze is in the picture; “Gossip and drink are the currency of insecure girls trying desperately to connect.”).

A lifelong wanderlust makes a recurring event of her impulse, after things go wrong in a relationship, to run away, clean the slate, start anew. She flees to New York City, to Hawaii, to Bali and Thailand – and in all these places she enjoys a few days or weeks where her quest for reinvention seems to have worked. A new, steadier normal takes hold. Maybe it’s a new job, or a long stretch of abstinence, or a healthy relationship. But things always dissolve. Impulsive cycles of casual sex with strangers, or performative/degrading sex with an abusive boyfriend, or cementing herself into a lukewarm relationship whose dead end she refuses to acknowledge.

Caroline Knapp says in Drinking: A Love Story that denial might not be a characteristic of addiction so much as another word for it, and Getting Off takes its most interesting turn when, in the third act, Garza acknowledges her addiction and looks for help. The structural feat here is that the swelling amount of graphic sex through the book’s middle section reaches, with this decision, a sort of climax and we embark on a different narrative, equally if not more engaging than the other.

Her epiphanies are had in solitude, and hard-earned, coming to her in little compelling blips. Like when her boyfriend River tells her, embarrassed, that he thinks he’s addicted to marijuana.

It seemed to me that porn and masturbation were the pot of sex addiction. And sex addiction was probably the pot of all addictions. After all, you can’t die from a whole day in bed with a joint or streaming porn clips. But life slips through your wet and achy fingers anyway.

What might otherwise seem like falling action, following her decision to change, blossoms and becomes the book’s heart. There are a few passages that take place in recovery meetings, and we read things we’ve read in other memoirs about “unlearning” something that someone once taught you to feel about yourself, but Garza seems self-conscious about the reader’s familiarity with this sort of rhetoric, about lapsing into cliché, so she doesn’t dwell. Her confrontations of self, outside of the meeting, are all the more gut-twisting for their honesty and lyricism, the rhythm of her voice. Like when she finally tells her boyfriend about her affinity for hardcore, degrading porn.

[I told him how] I couldn’t get turned on unless I was turned off. How I needed the women to be mistreated and misused – guzzling gallons of cum, slapped, thrown around, laughed at, walked around on leashes, ridiculed, dragged by their hair and tossed into the Dumpster. Anything that announced to the world that they were worthless and deserved to be humiliated. Because I felt worthless. I deserved to be humiliated. Porn was a mirror for how I felt about myself, a sexual being who couldn’t stop rubbing herself numb…

That Garza’s story spans her entire life might seem to suggest that this is her one story, chiseled assiduously down to its shortest form; but the brilliance of its pacing and structure, the storyteller’s know-how on luminous display, suggests the breakthrough of a writer who can style a story as well as she can play an audience. Whether the story of Garza’s next book is her own, or that of another, her voice in Getting Off will no doubt lure readers in her direction.

Alex Sorondo is a writer and film critic living in Miami and the host of the Thousand Movie Project. His fiction has been published in First Inkling Magazine and Jai-Alai Magazine.