An Obie award-winning performance artist and playwright takes readers on a personal tour of controversial arenas across America, where she "scrapes away decades of encrusted decorum from a subject (female sexuality) that is too often treated with a hushed sentimentality" (The New York Times).

Holly Hughes is one of the most popular and controversial out-there-and-in-your-face writer-performers around, and in this collection of some of her greatest hits she describes her career as an "escape" artist: how she escaped her conservative upbringing in a part of the country "where silence was the first language" to become an award-winning performance artist and playwright as well as a central figure in America's culture wars. As the Los Angeles Times observed, "Holly Hughes is everything you always wanted in a lesbian performance artist-and less."