Terms of Service: A Memoir

Anora meets Uncanny Valley in this piercing and erudite memoir in which the author becomes both an escort and an employee for the CEO of a major tech company.

For fans of Naomi Klein and Mellisa Febos, Terms of Service is a thrilling work-love story from one of this moment's most compelling feminist artists and critics.

In the late aughts, in Manhattan, acclaimed performance and installation artist and critic Sophia Giovannitti became a sex worker to fund her art-making. When Giovannitti and her best friend, Agnes, are hired as personal sex workers by Luke, the CEO of a major web3 startup, he becomes intrigued by their work outside of escorting, drawn to the ways their art mirrors his initial interest in decentralized tech. Soon, she and Agnes both sign contracts as formal employees of his company. By night, they have threesomes in luxury hotels in New York and Miami; by day, Sophia perfects her corporate-speak writing company copy, brainstorming opportunities to mine their creative and cultural capital for Luke’s start-up. The arrangement works—until it doesn’t. 

As jealousies and betrayals both personal and professional fester within the trio, Giovannitti finds she can no longer distinguish between her private and professional roles, between who she is and who she is being paid to be. But the stakes of her story fall far beyond the personal, illuminating the workings of tech, transaction, consent, and what it is to be human in our age of digital capital. 

A fixture of the downtown arts and literary scene, and the author of Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, which Nylon called "a blisteringly thorough, measured study of sex and art," Giovannitti is one of her generation's most compelling feminist critics. Through sharp, searingly honest voice and storytelling, for fans of Anna Wiener, Emily Witt, and Naomi Klein, Sophia captures the emotional texture of her experience: it is about sex work and extraction, about the contradictory choices women make, about how we reckon with the fullness of our desires, and about protecting the authenticity of our relationships with each other, and our own humanity.