Behind the Book: Through the Looking Glass

In 2016 a message arrived on Facebook from a young woman in Romania. She wanted to write a book. She could not write, she did not have time, and she did not have money. The usual story. I hear some version of it every month, and it almost always ends there.

This one did not end there, because of what she did for a living. She was a cam model in one of the largest studios in Bucharest, and she was open about it from the first exchange. I did not know what a cam model was. We went back and forth in direct messages while she explained her profession to me, and somewhere in that explanation I stopped being a ghostwriter evaluating a prospect and became a writer staring at a world I had never seen.

I told her I would write the book, on terms nobody would sign in a sane publishing economy. She would not pay me, and the book would belong to me. She agreed instantly, because her one condition was the mirror of mine: her real name would never appear anywhere near it. I wrote it under a pseudonym, about a woman who worked under a pseudonym, who told me her story under a pseudonym. Somewhere under those three masks there is a real person, and this essay is about the year I spent listening to her.

Why did I write a book about a cam model?

The short answer is curiosity. Her world pulled me in because I had never been anywhere near it. What does a cam model do all day? Why does she do it? How does anyone get into that business? Those questions crossed my mind in the first conversation and refused to leave. I like hunting for subjects nobody else is writing about honestly, and this one existed almost entirely in shadow.

The pressure was also as low as pressure gets. Nobody was paying me and I was paying nobody, so there was nothing to lose but time, and time I had. I had never written a novel before. Every book to that point had been nonfiction, mine or a client’s. A first novel about a life as far from my own as a life can get, with no advance and no deadline, was the safest possible place to fail. The distance was part of the point.

Who is Zeya, and why is her name not on her own story?

I knew her only by a pseudonym. That matters more than it sounds. Fourteen hours of the most intimate interviews I have ever conducted, and I could not tell you her legal name, then or now.

Anonymity was what made the book possible. The moment I explained that the cover would carry a pen name, that she would have nothing to do with the finished book beyond the private knowledge that it grew from her life, she relaxed into the project. She wanted the story told. She did not want to be the one standing next to it.

Why did she want it told at all? She got nothing from the arrangement, no payment and no credit. She never held a copy either, since she was gone before one existed. I asked more than once, and the answer stayed muddy. My best reading is that she wanted to tell her story to someone who could listen. Maybe it was therapeutic. Maybe it was a record that her life happened, filed with a stranger an ocean away. She never made it clear, and then she was gone.

How do you interview someone who is trained to lie?

Cam models lie for a living. That sounds harsh until you understand it as safety equipment. A model who tells the truth about herself can be found, and being found can be dangerous, so the studios train the habit in: nothing real ever leaves the room, starting with her name. The performance the customer buys is a fabrication from the first hello. Lying was part of her normal daily procedure.

So the first rule of our interviews was the whole project in one sentence: you do not have to tell me anything, but you cannot lie to me. If a question went somewhere she refused to go, she declined. That was fine. What she could not do was make something up. She warned me in return that the truth would be rough, that I would find she had lived a rough life, and she wanted all of it in there.

We did fourteen hours over Skype in the space of two weeks, a couple of hours per session, in her fluent English. I compressed the schedule deliberately. I had no idea how long she would stay engaged, and I could feel the window closing the entire time. There were sessions where she cried a lot. There were sessions where I did. There were moments where I asked whether something was truthful and she backed up and corrected herself, the survival training working against the rule and losing.

She also handed me my second sources. She brought other models into the Skype sessions and introduced me, and I interviewed them the way a reporter works a story, checking her account against the room she worked in. Those conversations were shorter and warier, fifteen to thirty minutes of standoffish flavor, and they did their job. The world she described was the world they described.

And she could unsay things. A few times she told me something and came back later with a simple instruction: I do not want that in the book. The retraction held, every time, even after she vanished and could never have checked. A promise you keep only under enforcement is not a promise. That rule now lives in my code of conduct, and it was tested here first, on a woman with no contract and no way to collect.

What is real in Through the Looking Glass?

The skeleton is hers. The flesh came from everywhere I could verify. I combined her life with the stories the other models told me, added structure and drama where a novel needs them, and filled small gaps from published interviews with cam models, which tend to run PRish and got taken with a grain of salt. The suicide in the book is a real event from a real life. It did not happen in hers. The composite method let me tell the truth about the world without betraying any one woman in it.

Some of what she told me is not in the book at all. Believe it or not, some of it was too rough, especially from her earlier life. I made the decision to leave it out, and I have never regretted it. A book like this needs a floor, and below that floor is material that belonged only to her. She trusted me with all of it. The reader gets what serves the story. That line between the two is where I learned the difference between witnessing a life and selling one.

Why is Through the Looking Glass not erotica?

I made a marketing mistake with this book, and it took me almost a decade to fix it. When it first went out under the pen name, I positioned it as erotic fiction, because it is explicit and I did not know where else to shelve it. The readers who arrived expecting arousal left the only weak reviews the book has. They were not wrong. The shelf made them a promise the book had no intention of keeping.

The book is explicit because her life was explicit, and it was written to illuminate that life, not to decorate it. The rule I set for every explicit scene was the same rule I set for the interviews: true to the material and true to her. A scene earned its place by showing how the room works, who holds power in it, what the transaction costs both sides. A scene that existed to excite the reader got cut. I repositioned it a couple of months ago as what it always was, a fictionalized memoir with sexual content, and the readers it finds now are the readers it was written for.

Why does Through the Looking Glass end without a rescue?

The last chapter is called Forever a Cam Model. There is a chapter called Rescue, and it sits in the middle of the book, because in her world rescue is an event, not an ending. She looks at her options and she stays. That was her truth, and I refused to improve on it.

She was making a decent living, not high end but decent. It was hard money. There is a lot of degradation in that work, and most of the men involved, by her account, are not nice men. The ones who appear nice turn out not to be. They come to her room because of broken marriages, or loneliness, or because an online relationship is the only kind they can make work. It is sad from all directions. Nobody in that room, on either side of the camera, is getting what they need. A triumphant ending would have falsified the saddest thing she taught me, so the book does not have one.

What does the title Through the Looking Glass mean?

I was thinking of Alice when I chose it. In the Alice books you step through the looking glass into a different world running on its own inverted logic. In this book the men are the ones who step through. They pay by the minute to enter her world, and they believe the glass shows them a hidden girl. What it shows them is a room she built and rules she wrote, presenting exactly what she wrote for them.

The unwritten law of the studio is that the model controls the room. When a member gets too weird, she throws him out. Even in the sessions that look like the opposite of control, the degradation the customers script and pay for, she sets the terms. The line from the novel that carries the whole thesis arrives on the first page: it is my room and my rules. Every explicit scene in the book is a demonstration of who owns that room.

And yet ten years on, I will tell you what I could not quite say while writing it. She said she was in control, and inside the room she was. She was also very young and very naive, and I think it worked against her in life. Both things are true, and both are in the book, which is probably why it works.

Why did I retire the Zeya Marsh pen name?

The book went out under the name Zeya Marsh, a name that belongs to nobody. At the time I thought the material did not match my brand, and a ghostwriter’s brand pays my bills, so the novel got a firewall.

In the last year I changed my mind about what the brand is. I ghostwrite books on any legal subject a client brings me, and my own library should make the same claim. A writer who can disappear into a Bucharest cam studio for 326 pages is telling you something about what he can do with your memoir. So the book now sits under my own name in the library, next to the business books and the memoirs, and if people do not like it, they can fuck off.

There was a practical education in the pen name too. A pseudonym that protects you from a book also locks you out of selling it. You cannot tour as nobody. You cannot podcast as nobody. I have published under several pen names over the years and hit the same wall every time, and I am not schizophrenic enough to market three writers at once. Retiring Zeya Marsh was less a decision about one book than a policy: no more names I cannot stand behind on a stage.

What did fourteen hours with Zeya teach a ghostwriter?

It taught me distance, the same distance a journalist keeps. I was not there to judge her life. I was there to understand it and to write it in terms a reader could carry. She knew I was building a novel and not an affidavit, so she talked, and I listened without flinching where flinching would have cost me the next sentence. Every client since has benefited from the discipline she forced on me, because this book pushed it to the limit. People trust me with their lives. That trust gets earned the same way at every price point.

The interviews taught me the arc I now watch for in every project. She started stiff and wary, the way people do when the material is dangerous, and opened as the hours accumulated, and the vital material arrived near the end. A cam model with nothing to gain and an executive paying full freight open up on the same schedule. Trust has one speed. That is why I do as many interview sessions as a book needs instead of as few as a schedule allows.

After the last session she disappeared. No goodbye and no forwarding address. A pseudonym was all I had to search with, so I did not search. Her life was worth witnessing and nothing I wanted to be embroiled in. The book exists as testimony for someone who may never know she testified. I finished it, edited it, sent it out for reader reviews, and the people who read it liked it. Whether she ever did, I have no idea.

Here is what I hope instead. Her plan, the one that came up over and over across those fourteen hours, had two parts: a family, and veterinary school. She wanted to be a veterinarian. It came up in almost every session. If I could look through the glass one more time, I would hope to find a woman with a couple of kids and a decent husband who knows nothing about any of this, treating dogs somewhere in Romania. The camera only ever showed what she chose to show. I would like to think the last thing she authored was the exit.

That is the first essay in the Behind the Book series. Every book in the library has a story like this behind it, some gentler, some not, and I will be telling them one at a time. This one belongs to the Wanting collection. And if you have a story that needs the same kind of listening, fourteen hours or forty, that is what I do for a living.

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