Getting Off

Erica Garza has written a riveting, cant-look-away memoir of a life lived hardcoreIn an era when predatory male sexual behavior has finally become a topic of urgent national discourseGetting Off makes for a wild, timely read (Elle). A fixation on porn and orgasm, strings of failed relationships and serial hook-ups with strangers, inevitable blackouts to blunt the shamethese are not things we often hear women share publicly, and not with the candor, eloquence, and introspection Erica Garza brings to Getting Off. What sets this courageous and riveting account apart from your typical misery memoir is the absence of any precipitating trauma beyond the garden variety of hurt weve all had to endure in simply becoming a personreckoning with family, learning to be social, integrating what it means to be sexual. Whatever tenor of violence or abuse Ericas life took on through her behavior was of her own making, fueled by fear, guilt, self-loathing, self-pity, loneliness, and the hopelessness those feelings brought on as she runs from one side of the world to the other in an effort to break her habitsfrom East Los Angeles to Hawaii and Southeast Asia, through the brothels of Bangkok and the yoga studios of Bali to disappointing stabs at therapy and twelve-steps back home. In these remarkable pages, Garza draws an evocative, studied portrait of the anxiety that fuels her obsessions, as well as the exhilaration and hope she begins to feel when she suspects she might be free of them. Getting Off offers a brave and necessary voice to our evolving conversations about addiction and the impact that internet culture has had on us alla profoundly genuine, gripping story that any reader can appreciate (Vice). In reading Garzas insight into her own experiences, we better understand ourselves (The New York Times Book Review).