In the summer of 2015, 24-year-old Carter Cruise summoned me to Los Angeles’s Line Hotel.

Sitting on an oval-shaped café couch, Carter was beaming. She had just won AVN’s Award for Best New Starlet and Best Actress — a feat accomplished only by Jenna Jameson — and she’d recently hired a publicist.

In the hip, gentrified Koreatown neighborhood, Cruise’s hoodie and dirty blonde hair contrasted with the straight bangs and acid-washed jeans of the girls around us — born-and-raised suburbanites who had sought refuge in L.A. Carter, too, was a migrant (in her case, from suburban North Carolina), but she had fled the South for sunny California to shoot porn, not to record acoustic ballads about cigarettes and coffee.

Carter, though, believed she fit in with the... Read More