Stripped
Down: A Naked Memoir
by
Stacey Keith
Genre:
Autobiography, Memoir
STRIPPED
DOWN: A Naked Memoir is a look back at a surreal world kept carefully
hidden from public view. This chronicle of life in the skin trade
follows the meteoric rise of Stacey Keith, a girl scarcely out of her
teens whose eye-popping assets launch her from wet T-shirt contests
to the catwalks of Houston, strip bar capital of the world.
Almost
overnight, she is discovered by a famous porn star, who Svengalis her
onto the pages of Playboy, Penthouse, and dozens of other men’s
magazines. While strutting her stuff onstage and across the country,
Stacey makes the fateful decision to head to Hollywood. She’s got
everything a girl could want: fame, attention, endless piles of
cash...but no idea what awaits her.
With
Internet porn overtaking men’s magazines, everyone from her
Mafia-boss road manager to her smarmy talent agent pressures Stacey
to do more than just flash her flesh. Uber-boob filmmaker Russ Meyer
verbally abuses her; rocker Don Henley tries to use her. Yet through
it all, from the warped misogyny of Playboy to the S&M dungeons
of the Pacific Palisades, Stacey’s dark, self-deprecating humor
will leave you laughing, crying and rooting for her at every step of
the way.
**Only
.99 cents!**
I don’t think any girl grows up wanting to be a stripper and a porn star. But I could be wrong.
The closest I came to asking tough questions like that was when I was seven and obsessed with Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp.” I wanted desperately to be Peg, the showgirl in the dog pound, rather than Lady. Peg was sexy and over-the-top. Lady was a dipshit who got herself knocked up in the park.
I’m driving to my first audition at a strip club in Houston. My stomach can’t find gravity. I’m hungry, but afraid to eat.
Besides, I’m too poor to eat, and that’s the problem. In a way, I’ve been building up to this audition for months—a bikini contest here, a wet T-shirt contest there. But the work is uncertain and exhausting, and it requires a high tolerance for bullshit (typical nightclub manager: “What? Of course it’s a cash prize!”) One night I bust a strap on my bathing suit and a boob flops out. The crowd goes nuts. I can hear glass shattering, shouts, the muffled grunts of guys getting shoved to the floor as the back row surges forward. The other contestants and I are hustled off the stage by uniformed police, and I’m treated like a sex worker for the KGB. (“Did you know the strap was about to break? Have you ever been arrested for solicitation?”) And always the punch line, this time from a cop with fast, grabby eyes: “So how big are they, anyway?”
Stacey
Keith is the award-winning author of the Dreams Come True series
(Kensington Books), DREAM ON, SWEET DREAMS and DREAM LOVER, in
addition to A WEDDING ON BLUEBIRD WAY with New York Times Bestseller
authors Janet Dailey, Lori Wilde and the talented Allyson Charles.
Twice a
Golden Heart finalist, Stacey has won a Maggie, two Silver Quills, a
Jasmine, a Heart of the Rockies, and over fifteen other first-place
finishes in Romance Writers of America contests.
An
avid writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and short stories, Stacey
doesn’t own a television, but reads compulsively—and would, in
fact, go stark raving bonkers without books, which are crammed into
all corners of the house. She now lives in Civita Castellana, a
medieval village in Italy that sits atop a cliff, and spends
her days writing in a nearby abandoned 12th century church.
The
two things she is most proud of are her ability to cook pasta alla
genovese without burning down the kitchen and swearing volubly
in Italian with all the appropriate hand gestures.
Follow
the tour HERE
for exclusive excerpts, guest posts and a giveaway!
Congrats on the tour and thank you for the book description and giveaway. I appreciate the opportunity to win.
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