I Am Jennie

I Am Jennie

<b>Former porn star, reality TV personality, and blogger Jennie Ketcham presents a strikingly honest, disarming memoir about her descent into the emotionally numbing world of pornography and addiction and her path toward recovery.</b><BR><BR> Drunk and high, holed up in a hotel room with a beautiful blonde she barely knew, Jennie Ketcham was thirty-six hours away from entering rehab. Her on-camera alter ego, Penny Flame, was a rising star. Her personal life, however, had been getting worse for years and finally hit an all-time low. <BR><BR><I>Guys are gonna want one thing from you. </I>To Jennie’s young ears, her father’s advice meant one thing: <I>You can use your sexuality to control men. </I>Life was imploding around her: her parents’ divorce, their spiraling addictions, her deteriorating relationships with them. She lost her virginity at thirteen and began a game of initiating boys her age into manhood. For the fleeting moments she spent in bed with them, she got to be the center of attention. <BR><BR>Eventually, Jennie found porn—that enticing world of immediate gratification, endless drugs, and seemingly endless money—and became Penny Flame. Divorced from her feelings, tempted into a lifestyle she couldn’t afford, financially or emotionally, she entered <I>Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew </I>to boost her career. But when Dr. Drew and his staff insisted she go by her real name, the once indestructible walls she had built around herself began to burn down. <BR><BR>Two stories make up this direct and disarming memoir: that of a troubled girl desperately fleeing intimacy and herself, and that of a woman courageously breaking down emotional barriers to build a new life. Many will recognize Jennie’s struggles: confusing sex with self-worth, addiction with love, detachment with strength. Ultimately, <I>I Am Jennie </I>is a tale of a woman who considers herself a work in progress but who finally understands that the only person she can truly afford to be is herself. <BR><BR>*** <BR><BR> I had never allowed myself to wonder why i ran from people, from connection, from what Dr. Drew was labeling as intimacy. I had never questioned why I habitually hurt the men I dated, or the people in my family. I had never thought: <I>Jennie, why are you doing this? </I><BR><BR>In the past, I had simply acted, and then moved forward. If I felt like crying, I shut the emotions down. This quality made me a good porn star. But it suddenly didn’t seem like a great way to live. <BR><BR>“It’s a wall,” I whispered. <BR><BR>“What do you think is behind that wall?” Dr. Drew said. <BR><BR>He looked directly in my eyes. The thought of something existing behind this impenetrable wall was horrifying, exhausting. I grabbed a Kleenex, thinking if I could make the perfect triangle, I could dab my inner eyes without disrupting the glue that held my fake eyelashes in place. <BR><BR>“Hopefully, a caring, sensitive person who can have meaningful relationships,” I said.