Coming of age in the late 1990s, one of my favourite porn stars of the time was Hannah. I first encountered clips from one of her videos on late night C4 television, and immediately knew I had to see more. The onscreen Hannah was funny and fun loving, wild and uninhibited, everything you'd want in a porn star. Time marches on, she disappeared from the porn scene but I never totally forgot about her, and her videos provided jolly good viewing over the years. I was therefore intrigued and surprised to discover that, after years in anonymity, she'd recently published an autobiography . A Girl Gone Wild is in no way, shape or form aimed at her old fan base, the crux of the book is her ADHD disorder, and its core audience presumably other sufferers, and those wanting a greater understanding of ADHD. Nevertheless A Girl Gone Wild is still an important book about 1990s UK porn- even if it chooses not to draw attention to that fact- since very little has been written about that era, especially by someone who was there, and saw that industry from a variety of different positions...no pun intended. Hannah was born in Grimsby, in 1975.
Considering Hannah's later hyper-sexual screen image, her younger self comes across as tomboyish, even prudish. Meaning her school age self is passed over in favour of more attractive girls, and what little interest from boys that comes Hannah's way is of a rather unsavoury nature. One of her first boyfriends calls her ugly and frigid, and her earliest sexual encounters are of a traumatic nature, including the first of unfortunately many rapes in this book...leading her to a lifelong aversion to alcohol and illegal drugs. Hannah's lifelong idol has been Madonna, whose footsteps she attempted to follow in, yet while the pursuit of fame and a need to be sexually provocative in her art paid off in dividends for Madonna, Hannah's is more of a cautionary tale. Every time Hannah hits showbiz, showbiz tends to hit back twice as hard.A Girl Gone Wild initially raises fears of vanity publishing, her childhood, student days and pop culture tastes aren't really that different to the average person who was growing up back then, and leads you to question whether her story warrants a book. Then again I do find that by their very nature autobiographies tend to be full of inconsequential waffle and only really come alive when the subject receives their brush with fame. Fortunately A Girl Gone Wild justifies it's existence and gets more incident packed as it progresses, more out of the ordinary as it's subject becomes more out of control. Hannah arrives in Manchester in the early 1990s just in time for the 'Madchester' scene, and given that she is a non drugs, non alcohol person might be one of the few people to have viewed Madchester through sober eyes. After getting a job as a barmaid in a new nightclub things get heavy fairly quickly. Criminality, gangland rivalry, and punch ups are the order of the day in the nightclub she works at, eventually someone pulls a gun on Hannah and she decides to quit. A Girl Gone Wild isn't, truth be told, the greatest argument for following in Madonna's footsteps. Inspired by Madonna exposing her boobs on the catwalk, Hannah does likewise in a gay club which passes without incident, but doing similarly so in a heterosexual environment, on holiday in Ibiza, leads to yet another rape. She then starts dating a man of Jamaican descent -again inspired by Madonna she does admittedly have a thing for darker skinned men- who turns out to be awaiting trial for armed robbery. He goes to prison, Hannah stands by her man, paying his rent and acting as a glorified taxi service for his family to make prison visits. Upon his release he acts aloof and indifferent towards her, appears more interested in pursuing an acting career and cheats on her with the first woman who comes along.
Prior to this book, Hannah's last word of her porn career had been a series of message board posts on the BGAFD forum in the mid-2000s, where she gave the impression of having no regrets. Cut to 2023, and A Girl Gone Wild offers a less, shall we say, celebratory take on that period of her life. I did initially fear a Linda Lovelace type hatchet job on porn here, but although she certainly has enough anecdotes to have gone down that route, overall I feel Hannah has been fair and well balanced about her porn experiences. These are a mixture of good and bad, but when they were bad, we're talking really, really ugly. Her experiences in Bahrain are particularly hair raising, and her narrow, airport based escape from that situation generates suspense worthy of Hitchcock. Her Hollywood experience is marred by a predatory agent, who insisted on casting couch favours under the threat of withholding work. Hannah does at least get to indulge in some much deserved schadenfreude in this book, by emphasizing that said individual was the owner of an exceptionally small penis 'a freak of nature'. Hannah starts using allot of fake names for people at this point in the book, I suppose this could be for legal reasons, but could also be a way of concealing any paper trail back to her own career. Keeping in mind she never refers to her self by her porn names in the book, nor the names of films she appeared in, or the real names of directors and stars. The book does confirm my suspicions that porn and glamour model work often go hand in hand with high class prostitution. Hannah is pimped out as a call girl almost immediately as she embarks on a porn career. Her introduction into porn is cited as a famous porn actor of the time, who she refers to as 'Ross' in the book, and dubs a 'pompous narcissistic pratt'. He recommends her to his girlfriend, referred to in the book as 'Debbie', who owned a glamour model agency but basically seems to have been a madam and saw Hannah as a cash cow. She also makes reference to a Yorkshire based porn director, who creeped her out by asking her to dress as a schoolgirl and, confirming her bad time vibes, was later nicked for kiddie stuff, but I'm no idea who that could be. The identity of others are slightly more easier to decipher, particularly 'Richard' an Italian director and star known for the sexually severe. Her negative portrayal of him as a bully and a brute will surprise no one who is able to work out the identity of that particular degenerate. On a lighter note her story about attempting to work in Australian porn, which ended before it even began, is particularly hilarious. Basically, Hannah and her cohorts endured a lengthy plane journey, only to then be immediately deported by Australian customs, who detected undercover sex workers, due to one of her party forgetting to throw away her receipts from her call girl work. Hannah seems to have had better experiences filming in Spain, even participating in live sex shows over there, which played to her Madonna obsession, and following in Madonna's footsteps of being sexual and idolised by a live crowd. Given how amazing her filmed porn performances are, it must have been an off the richter scale experience to watch her having it off live, corr blimey.
I think the book leaves you wishing that the pleasure she'd brought others had been reciprocated in her own life. The book is a series of reports from the battle field of what's clearly been a difficult, tormented life... you leave the book wishing Hannah the best and hoping that confronting her past in print has the desired, cathartic effect for this courageous authoress.
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