Girl, Undressed

A young British woman—broke and out of luck—does battle with Manhattan’s underworld of dancers, drugs, and the sex industryRuth Fowler is a twenty-five-year-old Brit with a Cambridge degree and a middle-class background who arrives in New York City with dreams of becoming a journalist. But getting a work visa in post–9/11 America proves to be tricky. It doesn’t take long for funds and incentive to run out—sending Fowler to the heart of Manhattan’s dark underbelly of strip clubs and the sex trade, where as her alter ego “Mimi” she works as a dancer for more than two years. Both raw and shocking, Girl, Undressed tells the harrowing story of her descent into darkness, the young and wealthy Eton-educated Englishman with whom she perilously falls in love, and her revelatory journey back to herself.