‘Thank You, John’ Is About Writing, Debt, and Keeping Sex Work Secret From Everyone but Family

"Sometimes I can trick myself into believing the stigma is gone... but then I step outside my progressive bubble and get reminded how quickly the old narratives surface," debut author Michelle Gurule told Jezebel about her past as a sugar baby.

By Samantha Paige Rosen | October 10, 2025 | 9:30am

Photo: iStock Books Entertainment

‘Thank You, John’ Is About Writing, Debt, and Keeping Sex Work Secret From Everyone but Family

“I could compromise access to my body for the greater good of my body,” Michelle Gurule writes in her debut memoir Thank You, John, as she, a then-24-year-old college student, decides to have sex with John, a patron of the Denver strip club where she works, for money. She’s one of the club’s less skilled strippers, and yet the job is “the only one I’d ever had that actually sustained my being alive.” But that income isn’t enough; Gurule’s quality of life is tenuous at best. She has a mouth full of cavities she can’t afford to fix, faces $35,000 and climbing in student loan debt, and sleeps on the couch in a two-bedroom apartment she shares with her mother, sister, and nephew. By becoming a sugar baby—in this case, getting paid to spend time and be physically intimate with John—Gurule hopes not only to improve her own life but also to pull her entire family out of poverty.

There are other compromises besides her body: honesty and socialization, as fears of judgment prevent her from telling anyone outside of her family about her work; joy and health, when the anxiety over each new sugaring decision leads to vision-altering migraines. The balancing act that Gurule attempts is the genesis of Thank You, John, which is just as much about sex work as it is about the difficultly of attaining financial security in America. It’s about attempting to put personal and familial well-being ahead of cultural expectations—and not always succeeding. It’s about how the people who know us best (in this case, Gurule’s parents, sister, and nephew) can anchor us in our most challenging moments through humor and acceptance.

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Thank You, John joins a series of books written by and about sex workers over the past few years, including Isa Mazzei’s Camgirl; Chris Belcher’s Pretty Baby; and The Holy Hour: An Anthology on Sex Work, Magic, and the Divine edited by Molly B. Simmons and Emily Maire Passos Duffy, and Gurule said these books all “engage with the complexity of our experiences rather than flattening them into the tired binary of empowering versus disempowering.”

“Sex work looks different for everyone,” Gurule, now 34, told me in a recent conversation, “and there are countless ways to inhabit that role.”

With Thank You, John—which takes its name from the phrase Gurule’s family members shouted whenever she brought home to-go meals after dining out with John—“I really want this book to complicate the way we talk about sugar babying,” she said. “In the cultural imagination, sugar babies are often flattened into a caricature: young, pretty women chasing handbags and beach resorts. [But]…for me, and for many others, it wasn’t a glamorous choice at all. I wasn’t interested in luxury so much as trying to secure some stability.”

Read on for the rest of our conversation (which has been edited and condensed for clarity).

If you could go back, would you have made a different choice around identifying yourself publicly as a sex worker while you were doing it?

When I had my first essay about sugaring accepted back in 2019, I realized I didn’t want people to find out about my sex work through a publication, so I took this trip to Denver where I basically went friend to friend, confessing that I’d been a sugar baby. And honestly? Nobody cared that much. Which was both a huge relief and also a little destabilizing, because I’d spent years carrying all this shame; lying, hiding, and making myself sick with the secrecy. After that trip, I wondered if I’d been a fool to keep it so guarded. I do wish I’d been more honest earlier, but at the time, I truly didn’t know how. I had so much shame tangled up in it that honesty just did not feel possible.

Do you think things have changed at all around views of sex work in recent years?

Sometimes I can trick myself into believing the stigma is gone, that people don’t really care about sex work anymore. But then I step outside my progressive bubble and get reminded how quickly the old narratives surface. When my recent HuffPost essay about paying for dental work through sex work came out, I got DMs from people who were kind and empathetic, but also plenty of comments about how immoral sex work is and what a “bad example” my story sets for young women. So, no, I don’t think the judgment has disappeared across the board.

You often reference your identity as a writer in the book, even before you’ve had the opportunity to really pursue it; it’s just who you are. Was this choice in part to remind the reader why you’ve chosen to be a sugar baby in the first place?

Writing is not something I chose so much as something I couldn’t not do. I’ve been writing poems and stories since I was in elementary school, but up until recently, publishing felt out of reach. I grew up without money, connections, or the luxury of time to devote to writing in the way I imagined “real” authors did. Even in college, I was taking on debt to be in school, so I never seriously entertained the idea of writing as a career.

To be frank though, even now writing doesn’t pay my bills. It costs me money! I often joke that I have one job that I work to earn money, and then writing is my full-time passion job, which I do for free. I work in academia, which has at least given me a flexible schedule and long stretches of time off, which feels like a privilege… But still, the tension is always there: How do you make art when you’re consumed by survival? That’s why it felt important in the book to show myself identifying as a writer even before I had “proof” of it through publication, even if it was full of self-doubt.

Dark humor is integral to the way you relate to and describe both your family and John. At what point did you decide to use humor in this book, and what role do you feel it plays?

While I was working on this book I was reading a lot of Sam Irby. She has this stunning essay in Meaty called “My Mother, My Daughter” that is classic, side-splitting Irby, but also completely heartbreaking. That balance stuck with me, and I wanted my book to do something similar. For me, the humor came first. It was much easier to lean into the absurdity of situations than to sit with the grief or shame underneath them. Writing jokes had unintentionally become a way for me to avoid digging into the harder truths of that time in my life. Eventually, with some help from my early readers, I realized the humor couldn’t just be a shield, it had to be in service of the story, a way of making the difficult parts more bearable to write and, hopefully, more fun to read.

How were you able to look at yourself, John, and the other deeply flawed male character in the book, Wes, with pragmatism, nuance, and empathy?

I’m always so happy when people say they felt empathy for all the characters, especially John and Wes, because it would have been dishonest and unfair to portray them one dimensionally. People are all flawed, we all have redeeming qualities, and we’re all just trying to make it through life. I wanted to highlight that truth for everyone in the book. I also recognized that my own desires and struggles weren’t entirely separate from theirs, so it felt important to make that connection explicit. I could judge these characters all I wanted, but I also had my own flaws to contend with.

Throughout the book, you step out of conversations with John to tell the reader what you wanted to say or ask in a particular moment, before telling us what you did say (which is often nothing at all). How did you arrive at that approach?

I’ve been re-reading Chris Belcher’s memoir Pretty Baby, where she writes about her time as a dominatrix in Los Angeles, and she does such a beautiful job capturing an essential truth of sex work: It’s work and it’s performative. I’ve noticed with readers, there’s often a temptation to read my relationship with John as something more—a long, evolving bond, complicated by time and intimacy—but at its core, the arrangement never shifted. It was transactional. Even when clients are paying for “company,” they aren’t paying for authenticity. I was there to maintain the terms of the arrangement, to keep John happy, to keep the work steady. The moments in the book where I step outside the conversation, where I let the reader in on what I wanted to say but didn’t, are a way of revealing that divide. They show the space between my interiority and the performance required of me.

You also hold the flaws, chaos, and contradictions of your family members, showing readers how you love them fiercely anyway, and how they’re the only people you trust. Why was this important for you to show?

There are many narratives out there that suggest it’s impossible to be fully oneself in front of one’s family. People have found it fascinating that, in my book, I was able to be my most authentic self with my family. For me, it feels like a hopeful example that such openness is possible.

I knew I couldn’t close the memoir without circling back to my family because the book is so much about them… And the last bits of dialogue, where my family is telling me what they’d want if the book made me rich, also captures something essential about us: We’re still dreaming about what we’d do if money ever arrives. Ending the book there lets me show both the humor and the absurdity, but also the reality that the financial need has never gone away, especially for my family. Life keeps happening, bills keep coming. I wrote a book, but the rest has never changed.