Stripped to the Core

This Is My Real Name

A review of This Is My Real Name by Cid V Brunet

Published on November 16, 2021

Queer, anarchist, punk: Cid V Brunet does not, at first glance, fit the stripper stereotype. At second glance, though, they have something essential in common with the other “girls” in the club: a desire to make good money, and limited options for doing so.

Brunet also has both a keen eye and a way with words, making This Is My Real Name: A Stripper’s Memoir a smooth read studded with golden nuggets of deft description and clever turns of phrase. On a good night, for example, the “crowd is stamping and cheering. The bigger I smile and the more I blow kisses […] the more wildly the crowd responds, throwing bills, whistling, even pounding the stage. When I take out my tits, the bar erupts like I’ve scored a touchdown.”

On another occasion, they observe more experienced strippers using their “luxurious charm” to “cast a spell over the whole club. Men are hypnotized,” they write, “their wallets opening and closing like gills.” Brunet has real writing chops, and is at their best when using this kind of fresh image to pull the reader into vivid, immediate scenes, as when they describe a fellow stripper who is asleep in their shared motel room: “She is wearing a sleep mask with an embroidered weed leaf over each eye, like coins for the dead.”

This Is My Real Name
A Stripper's Memoir
Cid V Brunet

Arsenal Pulp Press
$22.95
paper
320pp
9781551528588

This Is My Real Name is not only an insider’s tour of Canadian strip clubs over the course of a ten-year stint in the business. It is also the memoir of a young person struggling to make a living and imagine their future while navigating friendships, family and romantic relationships, and mental health issues (an eating disorder is mentioned). The alcohol and opioid use and intense body image pressures that all seem to come with the territory are portrayed, to Brunet’s credit, with admirable nuance. There is the occasional explicit comment on the politics of gender and of sex work; one might have wished for deeper insights in this respect, but this is not a theoretical tract, and what thoughts Brunet offers are well integrated into the main story.

The narrative arc is a traditional bildungsroman. We follow Brunet (known by their work name “Michelle”) as they come to knowledge and maturity, in their case complete with stiletto heels, banana-flavoured condoms, and a baggie full of Percocet. It also follows the literary convention of ending with a marriage – in this case, a commitment ceremony for Brunet and their long-term boyfriend. It should be noted that the very open, supportive partnership between the two is one of the pleasures of the story, nicely disrupting the stereotype of sex workers mired in abuse.

There is a lot of repetition. Not much distinguishes one club from the other; few customers stand out from the crowd; among the hundreds of other women Michelle works with, there is only a handful of developed characters – in short, the background rather blurs into much of a muchness, without a lot of narrative tension or momentum. The fact that the reader keeps rolling through the story is a tribute to Brunet’s writerly skill.

The stripper memoir is well-trodden ground, and there is nothing startling in this one. But there is real pleasure to be had in the writing’s best moments, as when Brunet describes the hotel room they have rented with a couple of other strippers, “floor littered with heels and luggage, makeup and body products on all available surfaces,” looking “as if a stripper bomb exploded.”mRb

Elise Moser is a writer and editor who coordinates the Atwater Writers Exhibition and co-organizes the Holiday Pop-up Book Fair. She has published three books and is working on the next one.