“The Price”: Natalie McLennan’s Girlfriend Experience

What is most compelling about "The Price," Natalie McLennan's document of her life as "Natalia," the face of New York's high-end escort scene in the thrilling middle years of this decade, is not the ins and outs, tics and foibles of the celebrities and other high rollers who would plunk down $2k an hour for her company: it is the absence of feminist, post-feminist, and post-"Girl Power" rhetoric in her book, which reads like the "Behind the Music" ("but for prostitutes") the author admits it is. And in that way it is a snapshot, not a mugshot, and a straightforward description of the cost of doing business.

McLennan, an aspiring actress and former Canadian junior tap dancing champion from Montreal, came to New York in 2000 and didn't catch the acting break she needed. Broke and single in 2003 and not knowing how she would pay her rent, she followed what was a surprisingly short series of leads into prostitution. But not the street kind: the limo and rooftop pool kind.

And that in three years it was all over isn't the story of the book. "In retrospect," McLellan told Fleshbot from Montreal, "there are only elements that I wouldn't repeat. Like the drugs. But I can't say it wasn't a great time or that I didn't learn a lot."

McLellan's rise from $700 an hour to more than $2k per session is fairly short. While she believes she is good at what she does, is well-read, articulate, and engaging, McLennan doesn't think of herself as model-beautiful. We get the impression that the world is ready for someone like her to occupy a space rather than submitting to her will.

"Post-9/11," McLennan said, "maybe people were thinking of other things."

She covers the logistics of the escort agency New York Confidential in a style that is less bookish and more like a MySpace blog. There is an inevitability about events with unclear antecedents, as if 20 years might need to elapse before we see the Why. As it is, "The Price" is valuable because it paints a picture of a New York where being the city's Number One Escort is something that can be advertised in New York magazine. What made this possible? That's a different book.

In "The Price," McLennan's world goes quickly from penury to shopping sprees where she spends $15k before lunch and, while we see some lean times and an absent dad in her childhood, we don't get the impression that she is damaged goods. She's got boyfriend trouble, sure, sometimes the other escorts get jealous, she wonders whether she should tell the Hollywood agent she's servicing that she's also an actress - but all of it seems so normal. She seems devoid of the baggage that accompanies women in most mass market sex worker narratives.

"Well," McLennan said, "that's because I'm a normal person."

Perhaps because all of the famous characters are still around, McLennan does not name most names, but this serves the narrative in that "The Price" is procedural and not a tell-all; we become more fascinated with her closets and the thread-count of her sheets than we do with who the famous quarterback is.

"Those were the reasons/And that was New York" said McLennan's countryman Leonard Cohen in "Chelsea Hotel #2" which, when you think of it, also paints what someone else might call sordid in a more matter of fact light. As New York Confidential unravels with the imprudent Page Six boasting of its owner, Jason Itzler, as McLennan becomes more mired in drugs, and as events sail toward their inevitable "Behind the Music" conclusion, we still know from the fact that we are reading an autobiography that "this just happened" and it couldn't be that bad.

And it isn't. McLennan got charged with money laundering for her role in the agency, is back in Canada as the manager of a spa, and is doing her book tour, spending a little time, no doubt, on Ashley, an escort acquaintance whose involvement with former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer caused him to resign. But "The Price" is not about Ashley, and it is almost not about McLennan; it's more of a mash note to New York City and the things that are possible there if you are a voyageur sans baggage.

· Buy "The Price: My Rise and Fall As Natalia, New York's #1 Escort"
(amazon.com)