In Costa Rica, or Panama or Honduras, wherever they’d migrated, when the piggy bank was empty, my maternal grandmother worked shifts in a local brothel to put food on the table. She wasn’t a regular sex worker but rented rooms by the hour. If she couldn’t afford the fee, she
Literature has been no more kind to its prostitutes than real life has been. While fallen wives have made memorable heroines — Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina among them — few novels feature the travails of working girls. Fannie Hill and Moll Flanders are the exception