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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.