By Erica Garza
Is sex addiction real? I was never particularly convinced, until one afternoon spent in a dark theater in Si Racha, Thailand, changed my mind. It was the spring of 2014, and the movie onscreen was called “Thanks for Sharing.” It starred Mark Ruffalo, Pink and others as addicts fighting to maintain sobriety — from pornography, from masturbation, from intercourse before commitment. They attend 12-step groups; they have televisions removed from business trip hotel rooms so pay-per-view won’t tempt them; they struggle for intimacy. They relapse (they hole up and order hookers); then they find strength anew and start counting days again.
I was overseas at a place called Hope Rehab, receiving my own treatment for what was, in my mind back then anyway, a much more “normal” addiction to prescription drugs; the excursion to the cinema was a field trip. My dates for the flick were other clients: a whole row of junkies, alcoholics and even one video game addict from Australia. In the car ride back to campus, we all agreed: It was an interesting movie — an educational movie — and we were glad to have seen it.
“Getting Off,” the debut book by the 35-year-old Mexican-American essayist Erica Garza, is comparably affecting. The memoir shines light on the lonely (albeit impressively multi-orgasmic) world of a woman who binges not on food or pills, but on hookups and “getting off.” Oh, and porn. Lots of porn. Teenage-cheerleader-and-her-stepdad-on-the-kitchen-counter porn. Wasted-girls-getting-walked-around-on-leashes-at-parties porn. “Bukkake” porn. You get the idea.
Garza, a native of Montebello, Calif. (“the Mexican Beverly Hills”), holds a swaggy M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia, but her prose is appealingly no-frills and accessible. She writes in the style of one who knows better than to linger too long on the eroticism of her memories — one who has learned the hard way how crucial it is to keep dangerous rushes of euphoric recall in check. She recalls, flatly but in explicit detail, a tequila-ridden sexual episode with a Colombian waiter named Andres while on a trip to Hawaii — despite being in a committed relationship with another man back home in New York. Such boudoir scenes abound in this book, and they are both good and mercifully brief. She beds dudes all over the world (naturally, the S.T.D. that pops up on Page 123 is only her first): Los Angeles, London, Paris, Bali and Shanghai. But these encounters are not without their consequences for her, emotionally. “The adrenaline racing through my body made me feel invincible at the time,” she writes. “And the shame I felt afterward was even better.”
