She’s a young woman in the big city writing a column about sex. She learns a lot with her friends, goes through scandalous relationships and ambivalent infatuations, learns to love what she thought she hates and vice versa, and confounds her own presumptions along this path. 

No, it’s not Sex in the City, it’s sex in the city. 

“Reverend” Jen Miller holds her own in the gnarly Lower East Side, engaged professionally in the competitive art scene in a variety of confrontative performing capacities, and also happened to found ASS Magazine. Oh yeah, she’s also the curator at a Troll Museum.

So no prissy ladies and guys named “Big” get written about in her work memoir, Live Nude Elf, just out from Soft Skull Press. It’s a collection of scribed “sexperiments” that has all the drama and humor of an adult TV show but involves being tied to a cross in the middle of a crowded orgy and visiting an opium den. Adult babies, Tantric immersion, and regular heartbreak are part of the curriculum, all begun when Miller began as a live nude girl at “Wiggles” (hence the title, but it’s not the last time she drops clothes in public in this book).

Miller falls in love just like anybody else, despite knowing bisexual performance artists who make jars of condiments their love objects, and it’s in her surprise in discovery of new feelings in experiencing both the weird and universal that allows Live Nude Elf to transcend Bad Girl manifestos or kinky sex manuals. As accomplished as she is in the underground, she brings a thinking-sweetness and hesitant-openness to these experiences that seems, well, naked. So Live Nude Elf is a joy to read for both acolyte and expert of amore, as well as the average fan of autobiography.