Author Allie Rowbottom didn’t watch porn until she was 20. With roommates and a bowl of popcorn, she slid in a DVD starring blue-movie queen Nina Hartley, shrieking and throwing kernels at the TV. It wasn’t until much later that she came back to the subject, privately and in earnest.
“I have preferred vintage porn in my civilian viewing habits,” Rowbottom said one afternoon in April while walking barefoot along a Malibu beach. “I just like the aesthetics better.”
For all the money and mythology attached to the San Fernando Valley’s porn industry, the world has remained relatively untouched by literary fiction. Rowbottom’s new novel, “Lovers XXX,” out June 2, follows two best friends’ descent into the industry’s 1980s heyday. The author spent the last three years researching and writing the period novel, set during the VHS-porn boom and primed to join the Valley arts canon alongside Paul Thomas Anderson and Haim.
“Who’s really in power?” she often wondered in porn and other female-coded trades. “A lot of the things that I’ve written about have been these sticky or challenging topics, things that I’ve struggled with personally as a feminist.”
Her 2022 debut novel, “Aesthetica,”plumbed the lengths one aged-out influencer is willing to go to reverse her cosmetic surgeries. Actor Tommy Dorfman snatched up the rights to write and direct the body thriller.
“I had felt like I had taken a risk with that book,” Rowbottom said. “It felt hard to sell and kind of risky, but it paid off. So I was like, let me see if I can push it even further.”
That pornography and plastic surgery occupy similar cultural territory is not lost on Rowbottom. Both are mass industries built around women’s bodies, publicly condemned and privately consumed.
“Porn, similar to plastic surgery, is something that a lot of people have a personal relationship to but don’t talk about,” she said, pausing briefly to pull a plastic bag from the tide pools.
“Aesthetica” brought a new understanding of publicity in publishing. Rowbottom joined a growing chorus of writers posting thirst traps on Instagram alongside book tour dates and reviews. “I have bikini pictures on my Instagram,” she told Vanity Fair. “But also, I have a Ph.D.“
She also joined the ranks of a post-pandemic L.A. literati adept at glitzy launch parties and scene-y readings. Hot and smart Didion-Babitz heirs apparent, a.k.a “literary ‘it’ girls” — were rewriting the rules for how to post and promote their books; writers like Nada Alic, Anna Dorn and Melissa Broder and, of course, Rowbottom, who supplied Botox injections at her “Aesthetica” New York book party.
In person, Rowbottom is striking — tall, platinum blond, soft-spoken — though less imposing than carefully self-possessed. “Glamazon” is the word that comes to mind.
“There have been times in my life where I feel I haven’t been taken seriously for no other reason than my gender,” she said. “I am writing a little bit from that chip on my shoulder.”
Rowbottom grew up in rural New England, a card-carrying “Horse Girl” whose parents’ divorce became small-town gossip when her father began dating her drama teacher. She went on to study at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study (“the same one the Olsens did,” she winked.) She developed and treated an eating disorder. Around that time, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, like her mother before her. Later, after moving to California for an MFA in creative writing, Rowbottom began work that would eventually become “Jell-O Girls,”her haunting 2018 memoir examining her family’s connection to the Jell-O fortune and the inheritance of illness, addiction and generational trauma.
The book established many of the themes that continue through Rowbottom’s fiction: women at odds with their bodies, mothers and daughters struggling toward one another, beauty as both aspiration and burden.
“None of the characters in an Allie Rowbottom book are well mothered,” said the novelist Chelsea Bieker, who workshops manuscripts with Rowbottom alongside Genevieve Hudson and T Kira Madden.
“What Allie does so well,” Bieker said, “is write about the ways mother-daughter relationships get warped or interrupted by patriarchy without hitting you over the head with it.”
For Bieker, “Lovers XXX” is “the least porny book about porn imaginable.”
Rowbottom’s husband, the novelist Jon Lindsey, pointed to her instinct for subjects that literary fiction has historically dismissed — either as unserious, feminine or culturally overexposed. “She was kind of the first one writing about influencers and cosmetic surgery,” he said. “I don’t know if people were quite ready for it at the time.”
Take this year’s breakout novel, “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke, about a tradwife influencer transported into a 19th-century farm life, as evidence of how quickly the literary culture had caught up to themes “Aesthetica” explored several years earlier. Rowbottom’s willingness to move toward culturally uncomfortable material is central to her work, he stressed, treating so-called lowbrow or feminine cultural obsessions not as guilty pleasures, but as material worthy of literary merit.
“Contemporary writers are shying away from challenging their readers, but not Allie,” he said. “I think that’s what separates great writers from so-so writers.”
Rowbottom and Lindsey work side by side from adjoining desks in their lofted home office, a French bulldog named Jammy snoring between them. They are each other’s first readers and, occasionally, harshest critics.
“In our marriage, criticism is probably the No. 1 source of conflict,” Lindsey said.
He described Rowbottom as unusually fast, capable of producing polished prose at a speed he no longer tries to match.
“There’s just an effortless cadence to her sentences,” he said. “A lot of that is there in the first draft.”
Their Paradise Cove condo is not unlike the home one of the main characters inhabits 30 years later in the book’s second half. The novel’s two-part structure mirrors its central relationship: Jude, a drug-loving 1980s video vixen who soars too close to the sun, and Winnie, the best friend who remains after everything collapses and eventually begins to unravel the truth behind Jude’s disappearance. The latter half shifts into a quieter register, following Winnie’s cold-case-style search.
“I don’t think I can write another book that doesn’t have some sort of plot-conscious thriller element,” Rowbottom said.
A few days after the interview, she sent over an exhaustive list of influences of writers, films, podcasts and other miscellany she might have mentioned or left out.
It reads like a journalist’s dream bibliography. The references range from her own reporting on sex and technology for Playboy and the New York Times to “The Godfather,” Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, “everything Andrea Dworkin” and Lili Anolik’s podcast “Once Upon a Time … in the Valley,” which explores the life of underage adult performer Traci Lords. “Lovers XXX” draws a key influence from Shirley Hazzard’s “The Transit of Venus,” which Rowbottom calls “a masterpiece,” noting its “out-of-time, almost Victorian flavor” despite being set in the 1980s.
Rowbottom hopes the book offers a clearer way of thinking about desire — where it comes from, and how it is shaped by culture and technology. “As a woman, it has often been hard to identify what I want or desire in a way that feels true to me, outside of a culture that has spent my entire life defining what it means to be a desirable object,” Rowbottom said. “I also hope it’s a fun, thrilling read.”
Rudi, an L.A. native, is a freelance art and culture writer. She’s at work on her debut novel about a stuttering student journalist.
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