Growing Up Naked: My Years in Bump and Grind

Rebecca Murdock is a lawyer with the Toronto firm Ryder Wright Blair &
Doyle.

Former stripper Lindalee Tracey has a knack for telling stories and an
enviable repertoire of tales. At the age of 16 she began stripping in
clubs in eastern Canada, Montreal, and the United States. Today, at 40,
she is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and award-winning
filmmaker.

Growing Up Naked is Tracey’s account of her late teens and early
twenties. As the author tells it, the strip clubs of the 1970s were a
sanctuary and a last frontier of “personal drama” and “individual
excess.” But all that would change with the sexual explicitness of the
1980s and with the clubs’ increasing emphasis on alcohol sales.

Many readers will recognize Tracey from her role in the NFB documentary
Not a Love Story, a 1980s feminist production that portrayed the young
stripper as a sex-industry victim. In Growing Up Naked, she sets the
record straight. Tracey describes her sense of betrayal and complicity
in the film, while reclaiming the dignity of her days as a stripper.

This coming-of-age story’s brilliance derives from Tracey’s ability
to suspend herself in that fleeting golden moment of youthful womanhood.