Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City

A young British woman-broke and out of luck-does battle with Manhattan’s underworld of dancers, drugs, and the sex industry

Ruth Fowler is a twenty-five-year-old Brit with a Cambridge degree and a middle-class background who arrives in New York City with dreams of becoming a journalist. But getting a work visa in post-9/11 America proves to be tricky. It doesn’t take long for funds and incentive to run out-sending Fowler to the heart of Manhattan’s dark underbelly of strip clubs and the sex trade, where as her alter ego Mimi she works as a dancer for more than two years. Both raw and shocking, Girl, Undressed tells the harrowing story of her descent into darkness, the young and wealthy Eton-educated Englishman with whom she perilously falls in love, and her revelatory journey back to herself.