Jump to navigation. The book's PR trumpeted that it "is sure to be one of the most-talked-about and controversial books of the year…the rock and roll version of The Satanic Verses. After actually reading it, though, I'm thinking that if The Last Living Slut does turn out to be one of the most talked-about books of the year, it'll be mainly because those publicists can't stop fulminating about how controversial it is. Here's the gist of the book: Shirazi grows up in the midst of Iran's Islamic Revolution, the child of a political-activist mother and an all but absent father.
She recognizes her own precocious sexuality as a shameful secret, and never speaks of the childhood sexual exploitation and abuse she experiences at the hands of older neighbors and family friends. Cut to Shirazi's early twenties, when she discovers sex and rock music almost simultaneously, and embarks on a quest to "fulfill my hunger for a free-spirited life" via backstage and often semipublic nooky with a passel of fellow groupies and rock dudes.
The latter are either washed-up American hair farmers Velvet Revolver, L. Guns , or upstart British metal bands Towers of London, Kid Ego , and she has a lot of explicit fun with them. Golden showers! Double penetration! A lot of girl-on-girl performance for the guys! Aaaand then she falls in love with one of the hair farmers Dizzy Reed of late-period Guns N' Roses, if anyone cares and he's a total douchenozzle and forces her to have an abortion and everything all goes to shit.
The prose is choppy, and full of contradictions: In one sentence, Shirazi writes of her first trip to see Velvet Revolver," I was there for the music, not to get laid," but then ends the chapter bemoaning the fact that she didn't get laid, despite servicing several crew members in an effort to get access to the group. She regularly refers to other groupies as "fat," and "whores," and not in a positive way. Likewise, despite the introductory disquisition on her embrace of the word "slut" at the beginning of the book, she deploys the word pretty judgmentally when sizing up groupies that she felt were less-than-deserving of bands' attention.
And for every delirious scene of wild, insatiable sex, there's one that reads as disturbingly coercive. I didn't want to do this, but I wanted to be polite.
