A strikingly honest and disarming memoir from an ex-porn star and reality television personality who describes her descent into addiction to sex, drugs, and alcohol—and her ultimate path toward recovery. Drunk and high, holed up in a hotel room with a beautiful blonde she barely knew, Jennie Ketcham was thirty-six hours away from entering rehab. Her on-camera alter ego, Penny Flame, was a rising star. Her personal life, however, had been getting worse for years and finally hit an all-time low. After her parents’ divorce, she lost her virginity at thirteen and began a game of initiating boys her age into manhood. For the fleeting moments she spent in bed with them, she got to be the center of attention. Eventually, Jennie found porn—that enticing world of immediate gratification, endless drugs, and seemingly endless money—and became Penny Flame. Divorced from her feelings, tempted into a lifestyle she couldn’t afford, financially or emotionally, she entered Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew to boost her career. But when Dr. Drew and his staff insisted she appear using her real name, the once indestructible walls she had built around herself began to burn down. Jennie candidly recounts her struggles: confusing sex with self-worth, addiction with love, detachment with strength. Ultimately, I Am Jennie is a tale of a woman who considers herself a work in progress but who finally understands that the only person she can truly afford to be is herself. Jennie Ketcham is a reality TV star, blogger, and former pornographic actress and film director under the name of Penny Flame. “I HOPE THE MONEY FILLS THE HOLES ’CAUSE, SEE, THE ROOF IS CAVING IN.” —THE HORRIBLE CROWES, “BLACK BETTY & THE MOON” I flew into Phoenix on a Thursday to work an Internet porn convention. I was trying to promote my webcam studio, a new webcam company that I couldn’t seem to get off the ground, even though I’d been running it for nearly four months. My boss, Del, wanted me to hang out, drink with affiliate managers, accompany him to dinners and parties, and be the arm candy he thought would help generate traffic to the site. By Sunday, I had been awake for two, possibly three days. After the first twenty-four hours without sleep, days bled into weeks, which condensed into minutes that could have been years. Time did not matter, because I had a singular purpose in life, and it was to find more cocaine. I had called various random numbers from the Craigslist hooker sections—the sections listed under “Adult Services” or “Casual Encounters”—until, on the other end of one particular number, I recognized my girlfriend Camilla Bangs’s voice saying, “Leave a message and I’ll call you right back.” So I did. I knew that, if I could get her on the phone, she could probably get some blow. I wasn’t concerned that it was 4:00 a.m. or that she might recognize my number and decide to press the IGNORE button. She knew I abhorred her hooking, let alone selling herself on Craigslist. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Del had started pacing. He walked fifteen feet to one wall and then fifteen feet to the opposite wall, shooting nervous glances from me to Kagney, a superhot blond chick I was in the process of seducing. I either had to find more blow, or leave the hotel room so he could find something else. Del was hunting for something other than cocaine. Just like the last time I worked for him in Vegas, he wanted to watch girls fuck themselves until he fell asleep, usually with a tired and hopeless look in his eye. It was the same tired and hopeless look that visited a drug addict at 7:00 in the morning when he realized that the day would proceed and he had yet to sleep a wink. In his hotel room in Phoenix, as Del continued scanning the personal ads, I tried to read his face. I also tried to read Kagney’s, to figure out how much time I had to appease his bossly desires before she got sick of the hunt and went to bed. I had been trying to get into her bikini bottom since I saw her at the pool earlier that morning. She was fairly new to the business and didn’t have the stamina of us old pros, so I wanted to take her to bed before she was too blasted to be of any good. I might have offered up her services to Del, but I didn’t think Kagney was hooking. While many porn stars end up “escorting,” which is just fancy talk for prostitution, she was still new enough in front of the camera that she was being booked for plenty of scenes, and so she didn’t need the extra money. It amazed me how quickly a girl would be “shot up” simply because she’d been booked solid for three months and ended up flooding the market with images or videos of herself. Then nobody in the biz could shoot her because she’d been “shot out.” Some girls were cleverer than others and only took two or three bookings a week, understanding full well that $3,000 a week was a ton of money, and if they put too much product out at once, their porno shelf life would be nil. Kagney seemed fa