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Everyone loves a naughty tell-all book, but only a few porn stars have captured the general public’s imagination enough to write successful autobiographies like Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale. Jenna’s was probably the most compelling of these books to come out in the last decade, but Tera Patrick’s new book, Sinner Takes All, does something that Jenna’s book didn’t – it makes her seem like a real person.

Salacious stories are par for the course in any porn star’s autobiography, and Tera obliges us with plenty of tales of teenage drug addiction, sex that borders on rape and porn set horror stories. She also reveals things that most of us – porn stars included – probably wouldn’t be able to admit about ourselves in such a public forum.

She cops to completely shallow aspirations, mental illness, spousal abuse and generally cunty behavior that are rate in porn autobiographies because no matter what people say, they care about how they’re are perceived by others. Tera shows sides of herself that make her seem incredibly unlikeable right alongside the stories of taking care of elderly patients in a nursing home and fighting back against a huge porn company that knowingly capitalized on her naiveté by offering her a terrible contract, then attempting to drive her out of the business after she realized how badly they’d screwed her over.

Throughout the book, the theme that stuck out most clearly for me was contradiction. In one chapter Tera calls herself a beautiful, powerful woman, then describes her degrading relationship with Erik Schrody (aka Everlast) in the next. At one point she says she loves her fans and then turns around later on and calls them the “perverted guys who fantasized about me.” The biggest contradiction of all, in my opinion, is her inflated ego as “the most famous porn star in the world” and the crushing insecurity that pushed her into emotional turmoil, bad relationships, and porn scenes she wasn’t comfortable doing.

If Tera comes out of this book looking complicated and paradoxical, her ex-husband Evan Seinfeld manages to seem even more dissonant than she. Evan writes a few chapters from his perspective that reveal him to be the suitcase pimp douchbag we all know he is, as well as a partner who withstood abuse, emotional manipulation, and pure insanity to be with the woman he loved.

In the book’s afterward, Tera writes a very raw post-mortem of her marriage and how she’d managed to be so oblivious for so long to the things that ultimately convinced her that the relationship was doomed. The perspective gained by putting her life under a microscope and analyzing who she is and how she got to this place was too much for the already fractured relationship to withstand. And she’s happier for it.

I didn’t leave the book with the impression that Tera might have wanted to give me about herself, but I was very moved by the courage it took to include the details she knew might make it hard to do so. From the experiences that led her to this career to her institutionalization in a mental hospital to the rise and fall of her marriage, Tera is straightforward and earnest almost to a fault – even when it’s hard to take her at her word. Her story is as much about her ugliness as her beauty and that’s what makes it a compelling read.

As I mentioned in September, Tera Patrick is divorcing her husband of 7 years. Coincidentally, she also just wrote a book called Sinner Takes All that’ll be out at the end of the month.

Some folks who aren’t me got advance copies and, as people often do with unreleased books, have started pulling out some of the juicier details in an attempt to sell more books. This is a good strategy. It often works.

In the book, Tera says that the reason she’s divorcing Evan Seinfeld/Spyder Jonez is that he chose making porn over an agreement they made when they got married to stop performing after a few years. From industry blog YNOT:

I feel for her. Basically, he wanted to keep fucking other women even though he told her he would stop doing that. For his part, Spyder told Page Six that the marriage ended because Tera didn’t like to have sex.

She didn’t like sex and he wanted to have sex with other women. Those seem like perfectly reasonable grounds to split up. In fact, I imagine people get divorced for very similar reasons all the time.

I guess the nicey nice things they were telling the media in September about how they’re still going to work together and be best friends forever weren’t really true. Go figure…

I’ve been hearing rumors for a while that Tera Patrick and her husband, Evan Seinfeld/Spyder Jonez were splitting up. Over the weekend, Cindi at Luke is Back seemed sad to confirm the news.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t be happier for Tera. Over the years, I’ve had several interactions with Evan Seinfeld and I don’t look back on any of them with fondness. The guy is the dictionary definition of “douchebag” and I was always perplexed by what Tera saw in him. Especially after an encounter about a year ago when I was trapped in a limo with him and treated to endless bragging about his new website (called Rockstar Pimp, of all douchey things) where he gets to fuck all these hot chicks and how much everyone wants to see that. I assume he meant everyone except people with eyes.

From where I’m sitting, Evan used Tera for a variety of reasons: money, access to porn pussy, an overblown sense of self-importance, etc. and I’m really pleased to hear that she’s moved out of their house and hopefully on with her life.