Help Me Sin: A Memoir

Yeseul K. Winehouse’s Help Me Sin is a modern day version of the movie Pretty Woman. A riveting memoir, it shows how a girl stumbles into the shady corridors of prostitution without much of a protest. An escort is not born into this life, she is beaten down and demoralized until this route becomes the only means to her independence. Raised by a father who ignores her and a mother who spits at her, Winehouse (aka Butterfly) develops into a young woman who has little faith in herself and her intelligence. While only in her late teens when she begins to sell herself for money, she does so after a promiscuous year, during which she sleeps with men in pursuit of love. She enters the escort business only to earn enough money to visit her boyfriend in Pakistan. Butterfly is eventually abandoned by him, and, rather than continue to have sex with men who use her, she resigns herself to a life where sex gives her something back: money and independence.

Unlike most escort tales that usually end with violence and despair, Butterfly’s story has a happy ending. She finds both love and marriage with one of her johns.

Although the writing in this memoir is not stellar or original, Help Me Sin is a relevant book that pinpoints how abused girls without self-esteem end up looking for love in all the wrong places. Butterfly is beautiful and smart, but because no one in her life gives her any credit or appreciation, she ends up finding value only in her looks and her gender, which forces her to turn to the wrong places and men for something she can only find in herself. This is a book worth reading for insight into the global ill that befalls our neglected daughters.