Chloe Cherry doesn’t do regret. Not about the adult films. Not about leaving Pennsylvania at 18 with nowhere to go. Not any of it. “It’s a genuinely pointless emotion for a human to feel,” she told Rolling Stone. Coming from someone who has lived the kind of life that invites other people’s opinions like a porch light invites moths, it’s not a throwaway line. It’s a survival philosophy.
And she’s about to put it in print.
Somewhere Dark and Hot, Cherry’s memoir, drops February 23, 2027, via Simon & Schuster. That’s the same publisher behind some of the most talked-about celebrity confessionals of the last few years. The comp titles in the press release are not accidental. Julia Fox’s Down the Drain and Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died are also books that didn’t apologize and made people uncomfortable in useful ways. Cherry should fit right in.
The broad strokes of her story are known to anyone who followed the Euphoria cultural moment. The adult film actress gets cast in Sam Levinson’s HBO drama playing a spacey drug addict named Faye with an uncanny specificity that turned heads and becomes one of the show’s most talked-about supporting players. The crossover narrative practically wrote itself, and plenty of outlets were happy to write it for her.
That’s exactly the problem that Cherry is trying to solve with the memoir.
“I don’t understand why, whenever any character or real-life human is a sex worker, that suddenly becomes just all they are to people,” she said. “Nobody can see anything past that.” The book is her attempt to put something more complete on the record with her words, her framing, her conclusions, before the world finishes drawing its picture of her based on a job title and a few viral scenes.
What the memoir actually covers is considerably more textured than the Hollywood crossover story. Cherry left an emotionally abusive home in Pennsylvania at 18 and entered the adult entertainment industry is not as a calculated career move but as a young woman with limited options and a deep need to be somewhere else. The title comes from the idea of Los Angeles that she carried growing up in a small religious town. The idea that it was spiritually dark but physically warm, both dangerous and magnetic. “My whole childhood, I spent my time wishing I was somewhere warmer and with more excitement, more action,” she said.
What she found in LA was model homes, porn sets, struggles with mental health, eating disorders, and drug use. None of that is sanitized in the book, according to early descriptions. The Simon & Schuster executive who acquired it called it “disarmingly honest, wildly funny, and full of hard-earned truths.” Cherry herself describes it as therapeutic — a way to take difficult experiences and convert them into something with value, rather than letting them just sit there as damage.
“It’s been extremely therapeutic for me to use my own experiences, even if they were negative, to entertain people,” she said. “I get to take these bad experiences and turn them into something that I can gain.”
The Euphoria section of the story carries its own weight. Cherry has talked about how the show changed the way she understood herself. Not because fame finally arrived but because for the first time, people valued her for her mind. “I was appreciated for being funny. I was appreciated for coming up with lines. It was the first time in my whole life that I felt appreciation for my brain,” she said. For someone whose entire public existence had been organized around her body and what she did with it professionally, that shift was apparently significant enough to rewrite her sense of what was possible. “It makes me realize it’s never too late to be what you might’ve been.”
That’s the through line Cherry seems to be most interested in. Not the scandal but the question of reinvention and what it actually costs. “The book is asking how far are you willing to go to get what you want,” she said. “How far are you willing to go to start over?”
She’s citing David Sedaris, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Hunter S. Thompson as influences. They are also writers who used their own rough backgrounds as raw material without turning them into cautionary tales. That’s the tradition she’s working in. No redemption arc, just an honest depiction of a specific life, told by the person who actually lived it.
In a cultural moment where OnlyFans is worth billions and sex work has more mainstream visibility than ever, Cherry is pointing out that visibility and understanding are not the same thing. People know what she did. They don’t know who she is. Somewhere Dark and Hot is her attempt to correct that, on her own terms, in her own words.
No regrets. Just receipts.