It starts with sex.

Everything does. I thought about this recently while watching a Twitch streamer play Smite, a competitive online video game. He’d banter with the people in his room, call out those who tipped him bits and even set goals. “Donate 3,500 bits and I’ll play Nike!” he’d say. When a viewer obliged and tipped him 5,000 bits, the streamer laughed. He playfully chided the tipper, saying that since it wasn’t the exact amount, he wouldn’t do it.

“Just kidding.”

This immediately jumped out at me because I’d been thinking about online personalities and streaming while reading Camgirl. Written by the screenwriter of Cam, Isa Mazzei’s memoir explores the online sex work industry where women and men make money by performing erotic acts ranging from simply stripping to masturbating and sex. It’s a rarely discussed, albeit incredibly lucrative, career field that has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry.

“They thought they were killing me. Really, they were going to kill Una, my online persona. Once she was dead, Isa would be reborn.”

Camgirl begins with a fake, staged suicide; a farewell show to “kill off” Isa’s online persona, Una. Una had been an escape, in some ways, for Mazzei. It provided a way to be financially stable and use her skills effectively. It also allowed her to keep herself locked away from intimacy.

Isa had always been the center of attention, whether people wanted it or not. She had this charismatic knack to wrap men around her fingers and camming felt like a natural fit as she manipulated her room to continually tip her to strip or draw or listen to music or perform sexual acts. But towards the end of her two year career as a camgirl, it became stifling and she wanted to go out with a bang.

Una had to go.

Fans of Mazzei’s Cam, the fantastic film released last year, will see striking similarities in the way the memoir opens. And it doesn’t stop there. In a lot of ways, Camgirl feels like a natural companion piece to the film. If anything, it reinforces how personal Cam was and the importance of diverse storytellers.

We’re quickly whisked through her early life, where we see two sides of Isa and her upbringing. On one side, there’s the outwardly facing, overly confident middle class white teenager who came from a rich and entitled family. From the inside, though, the family was falling apart. Earthquakes, both literal and figurative, forced the family to relocate and then, eventually, disintegrate.

The truth, as they say, is always more complicated and Mazzei tackles it with raw and painful honesty. She gives specific memories, such as her alcoholic mother who’d go on tirades that sometimes ended up with her threatening suicide and Isa being forced to call the cops. Her father, meanwhile, was, in her mom’s words, “Galavanting around with his whores” while she was raising Isa and her sister.

“I was leading two lives. On one hand, I was a girl whose parents knew celebrities ... On the other hand, I was a girl whose parents were so crippled by their own mental illnesses that they nearly abandoned her.”

As an adult, Isa used her talents to bend men to her will to go from being a sugar baby to wealthy men to camming as Una. It’s here that the memoir spends most of its time, recreating a timeline of the awkward beginnings of fumbling with garter belts and the panic of masturbating in front of people to the more calm and confident camgirl she would grow into. Along the way, she discusses playing around with her identity and sexuality before ultimately coming to an epiphany about herself and her past.

Isa Mazzei writes with candid playfulness and a (sometimes painful) self-awareness. She knows her faults, her successes and her failures, and is unflinchingly honest the entire time. I wasn’t quite sure what I would be getting with Camgirl, besides an insider’s look into a relatively unknown and “socially taboo” career. And, yes, that’s part of it.

Isa explores how she would go about commanding attention in her room and building relationships with the people who tipped her. We see how she did her research and methodically approached the gig. How she would network with other camgirls, broke personal rules and reinvented herself when the money and tips slowed. She takes us through the ups, like when she was pulling in tons of money and dominating the cam site. But we also see the downs, like when videos of her are spread uncontrollably throughout Pornhub.

This was all interesting and provided fascinating context to online sex work, but what hooked me was the other Isa. Like when she was a teenager, this adult version has a duality. Mazzei is a woman engaged in, and surrounded by, sex, but is uncomfortable with the intimate act of enjoying it with another person. She’s also a woman who takes the motto of “I say who. I say when. I say how much,” and turns it into a message of self-empowerment even as she gets further and further away from that ideology.

But throughout the positives and negatives, the truth is that sex work allowed her to finally reclaim her body, her identity and, most importantly, her life.

“I didn’t want to lie anymore. This was a chance to build a new relationship with sex. I didn’t feel like crying, I realized. That seemed like a victory.”

As the narrative winds down and we see how and why she “killed” her online persona, Camgirl shows its hand and proves that Cam was no fluke. Isa has this ability to take a subject and use it to explore something deeply personal and resonate. Cam isn’t just about a supernatural doppelganger and Camgirl isn’t just about Isa’s time in the cam industry.

I found myself completely enthralled through most of the memoir. I laughed. I cringed. I marveled at her vaguely sociopathic ability to manipulate and use men. But ultimately, I found myself crying as Camgirl morphs into a fascinating portrait of a woman struggling with self-doubt, trauma and intimacy. It’s a journey of acceptance and growth. And it actually helped me realize that the streamers I watch are cut from the same cloth.

Because, that video game streamer I mentioned above? After that large $50 tip, he joked around with the tipper and, before you know it, the same viewer tipped him another 3,500 bits. “What are you doing? Stop that!” he coyly laughed.

Then it hit me: This streamer is flirting.

And while he was fully clothed and playing a video game and not with himself, he was doing the same thing that thousands of camgirls and camboys had been doing since the turn of the century. He had his Twitch room in the palm of his hand and while he was ostensibly playing games, he was really just gently massaging the money from them.

See? It always comes back to sex.