For the space of the book, Burana, a San Franciscan who had settled in Wyoming after becoming engaged, makes the road her home, whether it's the Vegas strip or the miles of straight Western highways she traverses, perfecting her method of eating fast food while driving (burger in the left hand, fries in your lap, soda in the cup holder). Along the way she stops into boxy little strip joints and upscale gentlemen's clubs. Sometimes she starts working before she's even left her car, slipping into her wig and applying her make-up when she's delayed in traffic.

Reaching the destination doesn't matter as much as the generosity that Burana extends to readers, sharing the freedom of open roads, the beauty of landscapes zipping by to the accompaniment of good loud rock, the camaraderie of good stories to while away the hours. The perfect traveling companion, Burana possesses what is simply one of the most engaging voices to emerge from any writer in recent years. She is an acute observer, a considered sensualist and a connoisseur of delight, open-hearted in what she allows herself to feel and capable of conveying those emotions in effortlessly calibrated prose.

The subtitle of "Strip City" is "A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America" and if the first part of that journey -- disaffected punk-goth kid drops out, leaves home for New York City but doesn't make it as an actress, winds up working in the peep shows of the now-vanished Times Square, moves on to San Francisco's woman-run Lusty Lady and the Mitchell Brothers' O'Farrell Theater, where she helps unionize the dancers -- sounds like a story we've all heard before, nothing in the way Burana tells it feels familiar.

Nor is the second part of that journey in which Burana, now working as a writer (for Salon, among other places) is stranded in a Wyoming snow storm while on assignment, meets and falls in love with a genuine cowboy, gets engaged and decides to say her goodbyes to her former profession. She embarks on what might be called a solo bachelorette party, a year-long cross-country tour during which (billing herself, with just the right touch of po-mo smartassedness, as Barbie Faust) she will, with her fiancé Randy's support, work in clubs.

To understand the singularity of what Burana has done here you first have to understand that in some ways this is a lousy time to write about anything to do with sex. There's a surface openness about sex in the culture right now, a voyeuristic fascination with "hot" topics and a trendy exhibitionism epitomized by the infusion of porno style in rock style. (Does Britney Spears look like anything as much as a Vivid girl-in-waiting?)

But that surface is often a substitute for any real willingness to acknowledge and plumb the truths of our sexual lives. (To pick the most common example, the names of porn stars are now as familiar as the names of many other celebrities, yet how many people admit that they look at porn?) I'd rather this atmosphere than the prudishness of the '80s and early '90s in which women who worked in the sex industry, or even women who dared admit they didn't think lust was a bad thing, and women who didn't affirm the anti-sex rhetoric that dominated feminism, were regarded -- with implicitly sexist condescension -- as fools or victims. (Call it the "Madonna=whore" syndrome.)

But that doctrinaire repressiveness had its uses, offering the freedom of a secret -- and shared -- language. Today, the rhetoric of pro-sex empowerment, refreshing as it can be, is too blithe, dismissing any doubts or dissatisfactions women have about their sex lives as leftover traces of Puritan guilt. In this atmosphere, it's easy for writers to play to voyeurism without really giving anything of themselves away. The tease is easy but where's the strip?