Customer Reviews

My Undoing: Love in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography, and Prostitution

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Here was an opportunity for a clearly-bright gay porn star to provide some insight into what makes him tick. I was hoping for autobiography but also self-revelation. Why did I go into this line of work? What keeps me doing it? What trade-offs are there? But instead this is a relatively monotonous stream-of-consciousness "diary" with little introspection. It's reporting, not analysis. A few interesting moments but mostly a disappointment. I was hoping to find brains behind the brawn. Not so much.

Though labeled by some as an autobiography, "My Undoing" is more a journal of a year or so in Aiden Shaw's life both before and after a roadside accident which left him partially paralyzed. Much of this journal consists of accounts of which drugs Aiden did in which nightclub in the company of which people. It quickly becomes repetitious and a but dull. Perhaps the private life of a porn star is better left to the imagination because in this account, Aiden's life seems shallow and limited.

Because this book is a personal memoir, I will review it in a "personal" way.
I am "Lavern" in this memoir. Lavern is my middle name. I was a friend of Aiden Shaw's (real name Aiden Brady) for 7 years and experienced most of the events in this book. Aiden is an existential amoral nihilistic hedonist. "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" carries no meaning to him. Self-centered narcissism is the rule of the day. I have never met someone with such incredible amounts of true charisma. It is other-worldly, probably developed in a previous life. His "accident" was not an accident at all but intentional, due to his frustrating struggle with his impossible idealistic fantasy of "love" and his inability to acheive the idealism. His refusal to "learn" anything from his experiences and manifest change is a self-serving exercise for his hedonism. This book is a replay of his first book "Brutal" (fantastic!) and not written nearly as well. There are glimmers of his unique insight from "Brutal". Aiden IS incredibly observant of others and equally judgemental. His roomate in 1994 once told me that Aiden even observed how he turned a doorknob. His phenomenal construction of "Aiden Shaw", having just previously been a "tranny" ( as Aiden confided) is a masterful acheivement. Maybe he has realized a more real idea of what constitutes a love relationship, specifically with David Michael, aka David Logan ( his longtime "baby" as he always called him).
I observed and tolerated Aiden's tragic abusive treatment of others for a long time because I was learning so much I could apply to my own life in a positive way. When his abusive behaviour turned on me, I set out to teach him a lessen, instead of crawling away and licking my wounds like hundreds of others, letting him get away with it yet one more time. Plus, I was sure it would give him plenty of juicy matterial for his next book, (prediction fullfilled).
In the end, Aiden writes non-fiction far better than the boring "novels" he aspired to pen.
Lavern, San Francisco. (ps) I don't look like ANYTHING he described.

The title of Aiden Shaw's "My Undoing: Love in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography, and Prostitution" suggests that his life or his career or something about him was in sufficient order or of some significance to be "undone." Instead, the storyline, start to finish, is about the shattered wreckage that was Aiden Shaw in his thirties, who, it seems even at that age, was still making the same sophomoric, self-destructive choices he'd been making since his teen years.

He comes across as one-dimensional and shallowly singular in purpose (that of a sex object), lacking any more complexity or depth than a life-size inflatable sex doll. His quests for "love" are actually self-validation exercises: his need to be desired, objectified. Shaw's boyfriends during this timeline (predominantly the late 1990s) are little more than a sequence of repeat tricks. After each relationship inevitably ends, he is always perplexed by its failure to evolve to the next level, unable to grasp what is obvious to the reader. Shaw's series of attempts to find love reminds one of the definition of insanity: repeating the same behavior, each time expecting a different outcome. Even at the end of the book, when he avows he has "changed, grown up" (p. 303) he is unable to recognize that he has done neither, and the book concludes basically where it began.

The numerous segments on his sexploits are gratuitous and banal, presumably integrated throughout the book - too often clumsily - as prurient filler encouraged by the publisher/editor for the target market. These largely irrelevant passages are tediously repetitive and easy to skim past.

But one does wonder about his years of nonstop drug abuse. On the one hand, Shaw is always biking and vigorously exercising at the gym with seemingly serious attention to the condition of his principal commercial asset, his body, but then repeatedly poisons himself recklessly with all manner and combinations of deadly recreational and prescription chemicals. It is a dichotomy that Shaw does not explore or explain - a missed opportunity for some degree of depth. Then, too, given his perpetual state of mindlessness from the drugs, how are readers supposed to accept Shaw's recounting of events as remotely credible? For instance, was his near-death experience really an accident or, as rumored, attempted suicide (which also nearly killed a close friend trying to save him)?

The excessive use of drugs may also account for the most alarming and appalling admission in the entire book: his deliberate and careless indulgence in unprotected sex. In the years since he was diagnosed as HIV positive in the 1980s, how many men has he infected, consequently causing so much suffering and death?

I like Aiden Shaw, and I was excited when I saw this book advertised on Amazon. Reading this memoir was a disappointment, though. Shaw needed a lot more editorial assistance than he got in constructing this book. It is meandering,overall; Shaw wastes a lot of writing on superfluous details. But once in awhile, you get a glimpse of Shaw's writing potential in a surprisingly moving detail or passage.

The subject matter covers Shaw's life immediately prior to his getting hit by a car and his subsequent recovery. He evades the bigger questions about the widespread use of drugs and unprotected sex among gay men. It is a given in Shaw's world that drugs are widely used and unprotected sex sometimes results in HIV infection, ho hum. I found myself wanting to shake him and say, "But what does it all mean? You must know..."

It is worth reading, if just to see a writer in the process of becoming. Slick it is not, surprisingly, despite Shaw's background in porno and prostitution. Shaw emerges in the book as a likable guy.

This is a most interesting, personal account of "how", "what", and some "why" a person has become what he is in the moment. The perspective is intensely genuine, as much as the author is capable. I found this a fascinating view into the life of a physical, although necessarily remote, personality and his attempts to deal with his own evolution. It seems that many of the other reviews(printed here) have approached the writing from their OWN perspective. I do not feel that that is valid and appreciate Mr. Shaw's revelations and insight into a whole world that is both limited and international. How delightful to find that these fantasy figures are also real people and have distinct and impressive talents beyond what most perceive as their "genre". Thank you Mr. Shaw.

A bigger mistake than the writing of this book was my reading it. I can hardly believe I let my grass go uncut just to make it thru each chapter. If you aren't looking for heroes- or even anyone to like or admire- then this book might serve some need you have. As it turned out- it served no need for me.

The book is well written but the man's a fool. He's openly HIV+ yet still has promiscuous sex (that is, tops) w/o a condom.

At one point he says his sex partner is making "an informed decision" not to ask Aiden to put on a condom, yet how can anyone make an informed decision in this book? They're all taking fistfuls of drugs.

Here's a passage from the book that shows the extent of drug use: "Within minutes, back at the apartment, we had smoked, snorted, and swallowed every bit of crystal, cocaine, Ecstasy, Special K, hash, and acid we could lay our hands on. I can't remember ever doing so many drugs in such a short time."

Whoopie.

The man's a train wreck that happens again and again.

Dull autobiographical story by gay porn star Aiden Shaw. It chronicles him meeting and falling in love with various men, him playing with his band, him doing drugs nonstop etc etc. The book is well-written and, at first, it's interesting but it quickly become repetitious and dull. It's the same thing again and again and AGAIN! Reading on and on about a bunch of people doing drugs nonstop and/or having sex quickly gets tiresome. None of the characters are even remotely likable and Shaw writes about sex in such an off-hand manner that it's not exciting at all. Also there's no real point to this. It ends abruptly with no point or reason given. Why did we read for over 300 pages about a bunch of self-destructive jerks? The one halfway good section comes in the middle when the author gets into a car accident. It's hard to sympathise with him however because he was on drugs when it happened. Boring and pointless.

Ok, I'm not one of those people who go crazy or rave about a gay porn star, especially if they're well-endowed. Ask me who is Tom Chase or Chad Hunt and I'll be blinking my clueless eyes.

Anyways, what led me to buy this memoir of Aidan Shaw and waste my time, I have no idea and I don't think I'll get those wasted hours back. I think I got this book because I had read Shaw's books before. So, I thought that his memoir would be interesting.

You know how some people complain how some books contained expletives in every other words? Well, in Shaw's memoir, every other word was a name of a drug or a sex act. In other words, boring!

The only good part about this book (and I'm being nice) was his experience in the hospital/rehab after he was ran over by a car which left him semi-paralyzed. How he positioned himself prior to the runover...that's another story for readers and fans to debate.

Otherwise, unless you truly enjoy knowing one's active drug usage and frequent sex escapades, this is just one redundant memoir. I mean, really! He flies back and forth from England to the United States for more drugs and more sex. If porn stars are like Shaw, then life as a porn star is one sad life.