A New York Post Best Book of the Year
At twenty-eight, Asa Akira has already led an extremely unusual life. Educated at the United Nations International School, a highly selective private school in Manhattan, she eschewed the academic aspirations of her classmates and soon was earning a good living by stripping and working as a dominatrix at a sex dungeon. Akira has now built up a reputation for being one of the most popular, hardworking, and extreme actors in the business, winning dozens of awards for her more than 330 movies, including her number one bestselling series Asa Akira Is Insatiable.
In Insatiable, Akira recounts her extraordinary life in chapters that are hilarious, shocking, and touching. In a wry, conversational tone, she talks about her experiences shoplifting and doing drugs while in school, her relationship with other porn stars and the industry at large, and her beliefs about women and sexuality. Insatiable is filled with Akira’s unusual and often highly amusing anecdotes, such as the time one of her sex dungeon clients asked her to pretend to be a dentist and inject his mouth with Novocaine, or her visit to a New Hampshire sex shop run jointly by a mother and son. She also talks frankly about her relationship with her fellow porn star husband Toni Ribas (needless to say, the sex is good). In a world where porn is increasingly becoming part of the mainstream, Akira is one of very few articulate voices writing from the inside. She is a charismatic and ironic writer who has something important to say about sex and its central role in our lives.
“Akira is the Galileo of women’s sexuality, shifting our culture from the ‘dark Ages’ of slut-shaming into an enlightened celebration of female desire. Hot, hilarious, and engrossing, this book is a path toward greater freedom for us all: read it and evolve.” —Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa
“Akira is not only passionate about the porn industry, she is shameless, funny and even endearing.” —Susannah Cahalan, New York Post (Best Books of the Year)
“Relentlessly risqué . . . a lascivious, personalized journey through the pornography industry. . . . and the frequently hilarious, surprisingly humbling anecdotes of a life spent having sex for the camera. . . . Alive with an unconventional affinity for raw human sexuality, this exuberant memoir is effortlessly honest, without coming across as cavalier or catty. [Akira’s] passion lies in the rush and the “high” of the perfectly filmed sex scene. Open-minded readers will find themselves bombarded by a carnal locomotive of industry insider secrets and amusing observations. . . . Puritans take note: Nothing is left to the imagination in this hyper-sexual memoir of life as a porn star.” —Kirkus Reviews
“In this no-holds-barred memoir—which at times take on the form of letters, haiku, and diary entries—Akira shares her personal experiences working as a celebrated porn actress. [Akira] gives intriguing insight into the industry, particularly the bits about porn stars’ private and public lives and her own attempt to maintain a meaningful romantic relationship.” —Publishers Weekly
“An intimate look at her life. Each chapter is filled with brutal honesty and self-deprecating humor. It’s touching, inspiring, and flies in the face of a lot of people’s preconceptions about the life of an adult film star. What’s most refreshing is that the high points of the book aren’t the double-penetration and masturbation scenes–even though that stuff is great–it’s her strong storytelling, which makes her struggles and triumphs in the adult film industry super relatable.” –Erica Euse, Vice
“In her debut book, Akira finds an inimitable voice from the inside in a world where porn is increasingly becoming part of the mainstream.” —Examiner.com
“Insatiable: Porn—A Love Story is not for the puritanical. A hyper-sexual narrative of the author’s experiences making adult films, the memoir itself is itself pornographic. Its tone is celebratory, because Akira sees her career not as a descent into objectification but as a rise to celebrity.” —NPR All Things Considered
“It is common for mainstream porn stars to explain their choice of profession with some variation on ‘I just love sex.’ . . . When Asa Akira says it, though, I really believe it. . . . And yet, no person can act as the flawless representative for an entire group of people—and certainly not while writing a memoir worth reading. Luckily, Akira doesn’t try to do that with her book. . . . All of which is to say, her book is a lot like her porn: raw, brutal and always unflinching.” —Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon
“Asa Akira is the latest addition in a wave of highly raunchy but fiercely unapologetic female porn stars.” —Zosia Bielski, Globe and Mail
“Akira gives even the most household items . . . an entirely new meaning. Forget all the stuff you thought you knew about porn–truth is, you’ll never look at Baby Wipes, Q-Tips and Ziploc bags the same way again.” —Jennifer Swann, LA Weekly
“Asa Akira is insatiable in every sense of the word. Insatiable is, at turns, laugh-out-loud funny (the book is punctuated with naughty haikus, such as ‘Home from Trader Joe’s / Was it there for that whole time? / Dried cum on my chin’), poignant (she writes imaginary letters to her future unborn child and her mother, with whom she is close but does not discuss her career), and outrageously politically incorrect. . . . But above all else, it’s a brutally honest look at one woman’s journey through the adult industry, which Akira says the ultimate culmination of her exhibitionist fantasies.” —EJ Jackson, The Daily Dot
“The multitalented porn star Asa Akira’s twitter has been shared a ton and now I’m fully obsessed with her. . . . she’s so freaking hilarious that I’d be as into her if she were a comedian and not a porn star, but she wouldn’t be making as much money in comedy because of society. . . funny, but important. . . witty and clever.” —Blisstree.com
“Asa Akira is on a mission: To improve the sex lives of men & women around the world . . . and if anyone can do it, it’s probably her.” —MaxManGuide.com
A New York Post Best Book of the Year
On shooting scenes: “At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, almost every time I shoot a sex scene, I fall a little bit in love. It’s the only way I can describe it. Not necessarily with my partner, but just in general. With the situation.”
On makeup: “Every day, a different makeup chair. Thick layers of product caked onto my skin, only to sweat half all of it off during the sex scene. I’d have to get back into the makeup chair, and get more product caked back on over my sweat to shoot the rest of the scene.”
On stripping: “The only thing I hate is the one-dollar bills. I’m too embarrassed to use them, so I end up leaving thousands of dollars’ worth of singles in my car, for ‘valet money.’ It’s strange, I don’t even think twice before I show my inner organs to the world–but paying for things in one-dollar bills is just too mortifying.”
On being married to a porn star: “The guys you work with every day, those are his friends. Those are the guys he goes out with on Saturday night, the guys he turns to with all of his problems when you two are fighting. If they’re not his friends, he’s constantly running into them anyway on sets and at the gym.”
On sex dungeons: “Dungeons always smell the same way. A base of rubbing alcohol, with high notes of metal and semen. I’m not the kind of person to walk into a room and claim, ‘Ooohhh the energy in here is so weird,’ but let me tell you—the energy in a dungeon is fucking weird.”
On her first scene: “What I felt was empowered. Invincible. The whole time, I was conscious of the camera, and the fact that men everywhere would be watching me. It pushed me in a way I had never been pushed; it was a new high, and I knew I was hooked right away. In many ways, it was the best sex I had ever had up until that point in my life.”
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