Finally, the definitive literary Valley porn novel arrives

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Author Allie Rowbottom didn’t watch porn until she was 20.With roommates and a bowl of popcorn, she slid in a DVD starring blue-movie queen Nina Hartley, shrieking and throwing kernels at the TV.

It wasn’t until much later that she came back to the subject, privately and in earnest.“I have preferred vintage porn in my civilian viewing habits,” Rowbottom said one afternoon in April while walking barefoot along a Malibu beach.“I just like the aesthetics better.”For all the money and mythology attached to the San Fernando Valley’s porn industry, the world has remained relatively untouched by literary fiction.

Rowbottom’s new novel, “Lovers XXX,” out June 2, follows two best friends’ descent into the industry’s 1980s heyday.The author spent the last three years researching and writing the period novel, set during the VHS-porn boom and primed to join the Valley arts canon alongside Paul Thomas Anderson and Haim.On the Shelf Lovers XXX By Allie RowbottomSoho Press: 384 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.“Who’s really in power?” she often wondered in porn and other female-coded trades.

“A lot of the things that I’ve written about have been these sticky or challenging topics, things that I’ve struggled with personally as a feminist.”Her 2022 debut novel, “Aesthetica,” plumbed the lengths one aged-out influencer is willing to go to reverse her cosmetic surgeries.Actor Tommy Dorfman snatched up the rights to write and direct the body thriller.“I had felt like I had taken a risk with that book,” Rowbottom said.

“It felt hard to sell and kind of risky, but it paid off.So I was like, let me see if I can push it even further.”That pornography and plastic surgery occupy similar cultural territory is not lost on Rowbottom.

Both are mass in...