This memoir was brave and thoughtful and manages to avoid banking on being "scandalous". I look forward to seeing what this writer does next.

This is a gritty, truthful account of sex addiction through the addict’s eyes. Erica Garza cuts to the bone with her dissection of her problems, and I found myself curious, horrified, moved, and blown away by her writing. She definitely is a talented writer, I’d likely read anything she wrote. Fantastic and gripping story!

Less than a week after The New York Times published their bombshell report that revealed over 50 women have accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape, the disgraced Hollywood producer checked himself into a rehabilitation facility for sex addiction. In the months that followed, countless actors and public figures were accused of sexual assault and harassment, and all-too-often, these men used sex addiction as an excuse for their harmful behavior.


“Like everybody else, I get suspicious when somebody powerful claims they are a sex addict simply because they were caught doing something wrong. I think there is that real danger in using sex addiction as an excuse to justify bad behavior," author Erica Garza tells Bustle. "I think that it is important to note that not all sex addicts are out to hurt other people. We are more likely to hurt ourselves."

The pain Garza is referring to is something she knows all to well, and something she chronicles with courage and unflinching honesty in her groundbreaking new memoir, Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, out now from Simon & Schuster. In this stunning debut, Garza takes readers on a personal odyssey through late night Cinemax movies, internet porn, and serial hookups in an attempt to explore the cultural taboos that make having sincere discussions about sex, porn, pleasure, and addiction so difficult to navigate.

"I think that it is important to note that not all sex addicts are out to hurt other people. We are more likely to hurt ourselves."
"It is not really serving people who are addicted and need to talk about these things," Garza says. "If you can’t talk about it, then you can’t really start the healing process. I am really hoping with my book to open up that conversation and to make sex and sex addiction something that is not so taboo anymore."

Unlike the most commonly repeated sex addiction narratives that equate erotic dependency to the bad habits of predatory men or the inevitable result of a woman's abuse, Garza's isn't provoked by personal trauma, sexual or otherwise. "It is really important for me to show that there isn’t just one way to be a sex addict, and there isn’t one way to healing," she says.

Like most adolescent girls, Garza struggled to cope with the social pressures of young adulthood, and the corrective brace she was forced to wear only made things more difficult for her. At the age of 12, she writes in her memoir, she found her only comfort in masturbation. It was a dangerous kind of comfort, though, one wrapped up in an addictive feeling of shame that lead to nearly two decades of dysfunctional, and often dangerous, sexual behaviors.

"It is really important for me to show that there isn’t just one way to be a sex addict, and there isn’t one way to healing."
"There seems to be more shame attached to sex addiction, and sex in general," Garza says. "Sex is still very hidden and taboo and people are quite uncomfortable talking about it. When it comes to something like addiction, there seems to be more discomfort and more shame."

Garza is a firm believer that, if more people, and more women specifically, were willing to talk about sex and addiction, we could dismantle those destructive feelings of shame that drive addictive behavior, and instead create a better, healthier understanding of female desire. Garza believes the key to this transition lies in honest discussions about the subjects so many people consider off limits: sex, porn, and pleasure.

"Even if you don't have all the answers, it is really important to start the conversation, and to start exploring these things," Garza urges. "Even if the conversation is messy and you don't have it all all figured out yet." She believes that in "not keeping these things silenced anymore, then we will start to understand each other a lot more."

Being understood, or at least feeling understood, is also a crucial building block on the road to recovery, whether it be from sex addiction or otherwise. "So much of my addiction, and so much of addiction for a lot of people, has to do with feeling really alone in this, and feeling like you are more broken than anybody else and nobody will understand you," Garza explains. "More often than not, when you talk about these things and approach the difficult subjects you’ve tried to hide for so long, you end up feeling a lot closer to other people, and healing seems much more possible in the end."

"So much of my addiction, and so much of addiction for a lot of people, has to do with feeling really alone in this, and feeling like you are more broken than anybody else and nobody will understand you."
In publishing Getting Off, Garza hopes to kickstart that healing process for other women who are struggling with sex and porn addiction. In order to make real progress, however, more people need to be willing to share a different kind of "Me too" story, one that honestly confronts the kind of sexual dependency so many are familiar with, but too afraid to confront.

"I think we are moving in the right direction," Garza says. "I would love to hear more stories from women going through these things."

Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction
“…I’m not going to wait until I’m some pure and perfect person to consider my journey valuable enough to share with you. That person may never exist, and I’m OK with that. The person that does exist is flawed and insecure sometimes. She has cravings she doesn’t give in to nearly as much as she used to, but she still has them. She might always have them. But what she doesn’t have anymore – and this is huge, this is worth mentioning – is the desire to stay stuck. When shame creeps into her house like an alley cat, she pours some warm milk into a saucer so the poor thing can have a drink and then she makes herself a cup of tea so she can have a drink too.”

Erica Garza’s account of her struggle with sex addiction is the most honest and raw memoir I have ever read. It takes some sort of guts to write about yourself, but even more guts to write about what you are ashamed of.

I always check out the reviews on Goodreads before beginning my own; I like to know what other people think about the books I’ve read after I’ve already formed my own opinion. I was truly shocked to read people’s negative opions; Erica is entitled, lazy, selfish, and a few even pointed out that she had no true conclusion; No true recovery. Another person had the audactiy to say that her childhood trauma wasn’t a bad enough trauma to be mentally ill. Do we not know how mental illness works? Did we read the same book? I understand that she had the opportunity to travel often and to various places, but being unhappy with yourself doesn’t disppear just because you are in Paris. I think calling someone entitled for struggling with an illness, despite the grandeurs that life offers them, is a bit rash. Sometimes, it just isn’t enough.

Maybe I related to this author a little too much, but I definitely recognized her thought process, her self destructive patterns, and most importantly, her self-awareness. This, I would point out, is the beginning of her healing and recovery. I would also like to mention, that as an addict, there is no true “recovery” only a constant healing that will always take time and effort. So to say that the book had no conclusion, that she had no ultimate recovery, is silly. Her recovery, in her own way, was being able to acknowledge her patterns, and instead of letting it destroy her life and push love away, she chose her husband and most importantly, HERSELF. I think this memoir is more than just a story of sex addiction, it’s a portrait of how a young woman learned to finally love herself.

I would recomend this book to almost anyone, even those who are prude at heart. Even more, I think its necessary for every woman who has ever felt ashamed for who she is, to read this memoir. There is a lot of adult content described in great detail, and I feel maybe that scared a lot of readers away from the heart of the story. But I heard Erica Garza’s voice loud and clear and I applaud her for using it. I appluad her for her unremorseful honesty and for writing her story regardless of those who would choose to look down on her for it. There is something truly empowering about a woman who is not ashamed of herself. I know I will be talking about this book for weeks. Thank you NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A memoir of a sex addict and the multiple mistakes it took to get to ok.

I am so proud of the author for laying all of this bare to her readers. Such raw and emotional experiences and feelings and sharing all of that, impressive! A great book, very eye opening and interesting.

** spoiler alert ** Thanks to the publisher I received an advanced copy of Getting Off One woman's journey through sex and porn addiction. Erica is a brave woman for putting her story out there. She opens up to her readers and does not censor . It was hard to get through, not because it was a difficult read, but difficult to picture what Erica had to go through. Living her days thinking she was not worthy of saving herself for that special someone. She was looking for love and attention in all the wrong places. She got together with people she didn't truly love and didn't care who or care about herself. Erica felt unloved, unwanted and felt that she had to turn to other ways to forget that she was alone. When she went those ways,she felt ashamed and still lonely . Through Erica's story we see just how an addiction can be right in front of us and so easy to miss or pretend it's not there.

This seems like it might be the type of book that you'd read because you want a lot of scintillating details about someone else's sex life/sexual dysfunction, but this is not a book to be read for vicarious thrills. While it is explicit in places, more prominent than the sex is Garza's sense of immense shame regarding her sexual behavior. As a reader, I felt like I couldn't avoid being infused by a sense of "dirtiness" or "wrongness" about the whole situation. Like most addiction memoirs, it's hard to be a passive observer when you really just want the protagonist to start making better choices already!

With that said, this is a valuable book to have out in the world because of its honest look at a taboo subject. Most people are not open about their own discovery of their sexuality -- in that way, Garza's experiences are very similar to those of most people who came of age with the emergence of the internet and could not avoid having that inform their sexuality. The difference is in the extremes that Garza took things too, and her compulsion that goes beyond a normal sex drive or sexual curiosity. Although the writing itself is somewhat mediocre, neither female sex addiction or female discovery of sexuality is much discussed in our culture, and I'm grateful to this book for opening that discussion.

I also like that it didn't follow a typical addiction memoir story arc -- Garza does not try to convince the reader at book's end that she is magically or finally "cured." She is upfront that she is in a healthier place, but that she still struggles. This is preferable to a fake happy ending, although I hope that she is able to kick her addiction for good, for her own sake and for her family's.

It's very difficult to offer an unbiased review of a memoir. We, as readers, tend to feel very strongly either a connection or a disconnect from what the author has been through. It's often even hard to judge someone on their writing itself in this category, because many who write memoirs are not writers in their every day life.

This is not the case with Garza, and it shows in the flawless way she connects her past and present throughout her telling of her own story. She's an incredible writer, and I'm not interested in reading the articles she wrote before this book on the topic itself.

As for the topic itself: if you're reading this review, you already know what the book is about. You're trying to decide if you can connect with it. I didn't realize how cathartic reading GETTING OFF was going to be for me, and what it was going to be in terms of as a guide to things I know I still need to get a handle on in my own life. It helped me remember I'm not alone in what I've experienced. I'm a year older than Garza and much of what she wrote about the early ages of AOL chat rooms, etc., were a clear mirror to my own experiences, and I'm grateful this book exists if for no other reason than to know I wasn't the only one. Is the book graphic? Yes, but I expected it to be.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC of Getting Off.
I found the subject matter intriguing but somewhat hard to believe. I've had similar issues and experiences.
She always dances around the issue of prostitution, I can't believe she never was one.
I think she was very brave for writing The book, I would have liked to see pictures of her included.
I think the ending was abrupt.

This book is a fascinating look at a very personal struggle that the author has gone through. I was able to relate to a lot of the struggle that she shared which was enlightening.

Erica Garza’s new memoir about sex and porn addiction, Getting Off, is candid, quick, and as structurally clever, as commercially savvy, as it is intimate and sincere. It isn’t an addiction memoir that tries to shock, or to sustain the reader’s interest with long gruesome episodes of lowpoints or shady dealings or binges. What distinguishes the book from others in the subgenre is that it feels, at a svelte 224 pages that traverse 30+ years, like the sort of distillation that comes from a balance, in the author’s mind, of knowing the ins and outs of her topic, and a serious concern for the experience she’s providing the reader.

The cleverness of its structure comes with Garza’s honesty, and not just the appearance of sex but her descriptions of it, her use of sex as a device for hooking interest or manipulating the rhythms of action and prose. We first meet her in a graphic prologue, sex with a tattooed guy she doesn’t know all that well and then some porn binging after he leaves. Then we get to Chapter One and commence with the story of her middle-class upbringing in Los Angeles, a Mexican child who’s made quickly aware of the divide between her own family, her home life, and those of the white classmates with whom she develops co-dependent bonds. In middle school she imitates the fashionable new haircut of a dear friend, anticipating a stronger bond and maybe social promotion to follow, but her friend is mortified by the gesture, the theft of her image, and Garza is prompted – by the ensuing social rejection – to lead a loner’s life, eating lunch with teachers and reading a lot, cultivating the labyrinthine internal life into which she’ll recede, habitually, well into her adult life. It seems like every sexual encounter, every social event, is filtered through a lens of crippling self-consciousness, a performer’s interest in pleasing her companion(s), and the reader gets a sense, through Garza’s mastery of voice on the page, that the gaze she’s training on hardcore pornography, or her companions in a threesome, or her work in New York or a young prostitute in Thailand is the same vulnerable, curious, isolated gaze with which, as a teenager, she met the ridicule of her peers, or the adulation of judges in a pageant, or the first sonogram of her baby sister.

Garza’s candor throughout the book, her anguish first as a teen in search of validation and then as a young adult falling helplessly to her addiction, is powerfully wrought here – is in fact so powerfully and compellingly accomplished that the reader (or critic) might feel a pang of guilt to be approaching the text in search of those graphic episodes and finding, at the same time, that there’s a very vivid and vulnerable person at the center of them, hurting herself. But Garza knows that this is the case, and she plays to it. She never in the whole book strikes a sanctimonious chord, or recounts an affair with remorsefully coy descriptions like “spending the night” or “going to bed.” The sex scenes are sometimes erotic and sometimes disturbing and sometimes both. She’s as interested in telling her story, exploring her past, as she is in keeping the reader hooked, and she presents herself to the reader as both an intimate confidant and a professional storyteller. It’s a brilliant performance.

An addiction that first appears as co-dependency in girlhood finds an outlet with masturbation in adolescence, and finally with sex and drinking in her late teens and early twenties. Her first two relationships set the model for the roles she’ll play in affairs to follow: submissive, eager to please, tolerant of abuse, or else she’s dominant, cold, helpless to a strange desire for hurting her partner with some random cutting remark (especially when booze is in the picture; “Gossip and drink are the currency of insecure girls trying desperately to connect.”).

A lifelong wanderlust makes a recurring event of her impulse, after things go wrong in a relationship, to run away, clean the slate, start anew. She flees to New York City, to Hawaii, to Bali and Thailand – and in all these places she enjoys a few days or weeks where her quest for reinvention seems to have worked. A new, steadier normal takes hold. Maybe it’s a new job, or a long stretch of abstinence, or a healthy relationship. But things always dissolve. Impulsive cycles of casual sex with strangers, or performative/degrading sex with an abusive boyfriend, or cementing herself into a lukewarm relationship whose dead end she refuses to acknowledge.

Caroline Knapp says in Drinking: A Love Story that denial might not be a characteristic of addiction so much as another word for it, and Getting Off takes its most interesting turn when, in the third act, Garza acknowledges her addiction and looks for help. The structural feat here is that the swelling amount of graphic sex through the book’s middle section reaches, with this decision, a sort of climax and we embark on a different narrative, equally if not more engaging than the other.

Her epiphanies are had in solitude, and hard-earned, coming to her in little compelling blips. Like when her boyfriend River tells her, embarrassed, that he thinks he’s addicted to marijuana.

It seemed to me that porn and masturbation were the pot of sex addiction. And sex addiction was probably the pot of all addictions. After all, you can’t die from a whole day in bed with a joint or streaming porn clips. But life slips through your wet and achy fingers anyway.

What might otherwise seem like falling action, following her decision to change, blossoms and becomes the book’s heart. There are a few passages that take place in recovery meetings, and we read things we’ve read in other memoirs about “unlearning” something that someone once taught you to feel about yourself, but Garza seems self-conscious about the reader’s familiarity with this sort of rhetoric, about lapsing into cliché, so she doesn’t dwell. Her confrontations of self, outside of the meeting, are all the more gut-twisting for their honesty and lyricism, the rhythm of her voice. Like when she finally tells her boyfriend about her affinity for hardcore, degrading porn.

[I told him how] I couldn’t get turned on unless I was turned off. How I needed the women to be mistreated and misused – guzzling gallons of cum, slapped, thrown around, laughed at, walked around on leashes, ridiculed, dragged by their hair and tossed into the Dumpster. Anything that announced to the world that they were worthless and deserved to be humiliated. Because I felt worthless. I deserved to be humiliated. Porn was a mirror for how I felt about myself, a sexual being who couldn’t stop rubbing herself numb…

That Garza’s story spans her entire life might seem to suggest that this is her one story, chiseled assiduously down to its shortest form; but the brilliance of its pacing and structure, the storyteller’s know-how on luminous display, suggests the breakthrough of a writer who can style a story as well as she can play an audience. Whether the story of Garza’s next book is her own, or that of another, her voice in Getting Off will no doubt lure readers in her direction.

Alex Sorondo is a writer and film critic living in Miami and the host of the Thousand Movie Project. His fiction has been published in First Inkling Magazine and Jai-Alai Magazine.

A very honest book on a subject that is difficult to talk about. Very interesting read.

Very honest account of addiction and the effects it can have on one's life. This addiction happens to be porn and it is a female who is the addict. I found myself engrossed in the author's account and her honesty. The book had me wondering when was she going to stop, but then I remembered, addiction in any form is not easy to cease. Well written and very informative. Kudos to the author for her owning her addiction and allowing us a glimpse into her life. Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

This was a wonderful and raw read, for sharing your story is brave and real. Finding ourselves is not always easy and this story was well written and putting it all out there to share with readers comes with a lot of bravery. I say bravo to this book and the author.

Wow! This book starts off with a bang (pun totally intended!) and just keeps on surprising. Being a middle-aged premenopausal woman, I had no clue that there are women out there who suffer from this. I had assumed it was only a man thing, but boy sdid this book clear that myth up... and in a hurry! The boom is written using some tongue in cheek humor and the author holds nothing back. It was a fascinating, enjoyable read without being way over the top, seedy or too graphic. Would definitely recommend!

Very honest and well written. There were moments so relatable it was almost embarrassing, but very refreshing to hear coming from another person.

Sexual addiction is often misunderstood, and remains largely a taboo subject. Some psychiatrists and other mental -health professionals do not identify or diagnose this condition, which may co-occur with problematic obsessive compulsive symptoms and other disturbing behaviors. In “Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction” writer Erica Garza shared her courageous and dynamic story of how her addiction to sex and pornography prevented her from having a normal life and healthy fulfilling relationships with others.

Garza was emotionally up front and graphic regarding her sexual encounters with men she barely knew. Clay, a huge beefy man with neck tattoos, might call or not. Usually drunk and/or high, he visited Garza for sex In the wee hours of the morning; she was sober. There was no need for condoms or conversation—what would they talk about, anyway? Real dates of dining, dancing or drinks were totally unnecessary. After Clay left, Garza would turn to computer porn and/or her favorite fantasies involving two sweaty women, a warehouse, fifty “horny” men, a harness, hairdryer and a taxicab. According to Garza, this was the disgusting “revolting” mix of shame and sexual excitement that seemed to fuel a bizarre ritualistic loop that brought a temporary gratification and relief that she craved for over two decades.

As a writer, Garza lived abroad often with accomplished professional men that genuinely loved her. After engagements and/or wedding planning, meeting parents— her deep insecurities, poor self-esteem, severe jealousy, led her to sexually act out and sabotage her love relationships. *Garza would break plans with the people who needed her—family members, friends—or not make plans at all, because she didn’t want to miss out on any potential opportunity to have sex.
There was no childhood trauma, neglect or abuse in her life history. In fact, she was raised in an ordinary and supportive Catholic home by her Mexican parents in Southeast Los Angeles in Montebello, CA. When she was 12 years old she started to masturbate-- seemingly to relieve stress and anxiety. On cable she discovered porn, her tastes for it only evolved when she began downloading it, which eventually led to compulsive viewing on her laptop. Online she could be anyone, and explore her perversions with other like-minded individuals.

It would be five years after Garza acknowledged her deep seated sexual problems when she began attending Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), and studied self-help books. Marriage to her husband River connected her to a deeper level of her own humanity. When she wrote an essay about sex addiction for Salon.com (2014) she heard from others with similar problems. These healthy connections with others were vital in a three stage recovery process; with the final stage leading Garza and her husband in an unexpected direction. ** With thanks and appreciation to Simon & Schuster via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.

At first I was fascinated by Garza's tale but about halfway through all of the details (and raunchiness) got a little tedious, especially when she kept making such horrible choices in her love activities. However, I greatly admire the author's bravery in being so candid about every aspect of her life.

Thanks to the publisher for the advance digital reading copy.

Garza has tackled a pretty much taboo subject in an open and honest way. She's not a particularly likable woman but she owns her issues. The reaction to this will be interesting, as sex addiction is more often the subject of jokes than serious study. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I'm not sure who to recommend this to as it's a one off type of book. Definitely an interesting read.