Customer Reviews

True Porn Clerk Stories

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Years ago, Ali had a blog where she would write about the weirdness that happened at work. She'd tell us about the video store and casting calls and screenplays and she kept our interest and told a damn fine tale.
One day she up and disappeared.
Now she's back with the true tales neatly packaged to be carried on your commute bringing smiles and chuckles and perhaps an outright laugh or three. Though NSFW, it is the best thing to get you out of thinking that your job sucks.
Buy it, support Ali, maybe she'll write more true tales for us.

Ali's witty and insightful take on the life of a video store clerk is infinitely readable. Blending her razor sharp wit, knowledge of anthropology, and her keen observational skills, Ali shares with us her view of the human condition as only she can. Expect to be amused, appalled, and agog.

And, if that's not a good enough reason to read this book then do it to find out how she handles the situation with the needy regular...

Ali's tales are the kind of thing you end up re-reading on a near-regular schedule. The want for more stories is somewhat bittersweet in that you are disappointed when you near the end, but you're glad she got out. Perhaps there's a "True Auditioning Actress Stories" in our future?

From a comedienne who is also a clerk at a video shop that rents porn, you would expect funny anecdotes. Probably with a healthy side helping of sarcasm. When that comedienne/clerk is also an anthropologist, you might reasonably expect some insight into what is, frankly, a widespread yet rarely-discussed subculture in America--porn renters. If the lady also happens to be a talented freelance writer with some time on her hands and a computer, well, obviously there must be a pretty interesting blog somewhere.

Ali Davis delivered on all fronts, and now her True Porn Clerk Stories have been collected into a nice, tidy--funny--bundle. And yes, there is humor; the titles of the videos she handled, her nicknames for regular customers, the inevitable flare-ups of her temper. There is also an unexpected cache of laughs in her occasional treatment of "porn addicts" as the unwitting subjects of her anthropological analysis. (She's identified the castes, the society's rules, and the prevailing attitudes.) Even the stuff that is frankly pretty gross--prepare for fluids--has an aspect of surreal humor all its own.

More impressively, though, the stories are insightful. What makes Davis's take on the anecdotes so unique is that, while tough enough to deal with porn renters nine hours a day, she doesn't seem jaded. Granted, she gets pissed at thieves, public masturbators and self-important jerks with cell phones. She's no wide-eyed pushover. But somehow, incredibly, she seems optimistic about people generally, and approaches each new customer with professional courtesy and an open mind.

Her take on porn itself is interesting; as a self-described "First Amendment Feminist," she defends the right to make, watch, and rent porn, "as long as all parties are willing adults." However, there are instances--how could there not be?--where she finds particular tapes, situations, and customers obscene or disturbing. At the same time, she takes pride in the wide range of races, sexualities and, well, fetishes her store caters to. She champions the rights of her handicapped customers, and bewails society's and the adult movie industry's stubborn insistence that porn is for men, not women. It is interesting to see her strive, yearlong, to avoid making judgments and generalizations about porn renters--only to have visceral, instinctive understandings that some of her customers are "dirtbags."

You'll laugh, you'll cringe. You won't cry, but you will empathize, probably with people you wouldn't expect to. It's a normal person's view of a part of society that's still taboo, even though--as Davis points out--half of the people who rent movies rent porn. And that's why it's innately interesting. It's a great summary of a year's worth of minimum wage customer service, with a great range of humor an introspection thrown in. And the soundtrack's not half bad, either.

Ali Davis is funny. Very funny. And you need funny to tackle this kind of subject matter. But Ali Davis is not only funny. She's astute. And clever. And unabashed. And an amazing observer of human behavior. And she has an opinion, but never once did it get in the way of me forming my own. And did I mention she's funny? I did? Well, it bears repeating.

The title is not a ruse. It is exactly what you'll get. No, that's untrue. You will get what the title promises, but then you'll get a lot more.

Ali Davis writes this so honestly and with a certain humour that makes this book a must-buy for anyone with a sense of humour about these things.

She's the Matt Taibbi of minimum wage. The Margaret Mead of the maligned male. She's got a BA in Anthropology from William and Mary, and she knows how to use it.

She's blogger extraordinaire Ali Davis, and she approves this message, finally in convenient Kindle and book form. "True Porn Clerk Stories" is everything you didn't realize you wanted to know about working in an adult video store, and didn't think to ask: Men. Bosses. The night shift. Weird people. Sad people. People who are neither weird nor sad. Video clerks. I think there might be cars that turn into robots at the end there, too, but I wouldn't swear to it. Almost no one gets naked, but Ali's keen eye and wit strips them all bare nonetheless.

True Porn Clerk Stories is a series of fun tales about people and porn videos, and the strange ways they intersect in one Chicago storefront. You'll laugh, you'll gasp, you'll be amazed that someone found a good use for a liberal arts degree, even while working at a video store that rents out a lot of porn.

Very funny. We have all wondered what gross amd crazy things go on in a porn store. Ali tells it like it is.

What would you do if you found yourself working in a video store in Chicagoland, checking out and restocking porn for $6.50 an hour to pay the bills? I know what I'd do. I'd take notes.

That's pretty much what Ali Davis does too. She starts a blog to report on her shifts at the porn rental store. And after the job ends and the blog ends and she goes on to the next phase in her life, she shares this diary in the form of a book.

I wasn't cool enough to have even heard of the blog. I mean, this blog was one of the first blogs to really explode internationally, after Ali read from True Porn Clerk Stories on This American Life. But I missed all that. I discovered the book by following Ali on Twitter.

She's not just holding these people up for our amusement, although there is plenty of amusement to be found. Ali offers us her perspective on why people rent porn, what happens when you get down to that hardcore core of your being, where the right to view porn fits into her personal philosophy, and how that philosophy changed as it became informed by her experiences in the rental store.

You know how I tell a really good book? As soon as I read the last word, I return to the beginning and start reading the whole thing again. I loved this book from the splash page to the last page. I frequently laughed out loud.

The was probably one of the best blogs I've ever read. It actually inspired me to write when I was in college - she wrote this around the same time I lived in Chicago. I've read it time and time and again and I've read it to friends. Really awesome stuff.