There’s a good amount of bullshitting in The Last Days of August, despite Welsh journalist Jon Ronson’s best efforts to cut to the truth. Ronson is known for his investigative but extremely readable books So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test. Last year saw him breaking into the podcast world with the Audible original series The Butterfly Effect, which explores how free porn streaming sites like PornHub have cut into the profits of the previously well-monied porn industry.
August feels like a sequel to Butterfly Effect due to Ronson’s continued attempts to objectively cover the lives of porn actors, humanize them, and this time, get at the true-crime-y story of August Ames, a porn actress who killed herself in December 2017. It also feels like he’s building on So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, his 2015 book about the history of modern online disgrace, because until Ronson starts digging, the popular theory surrounding Ames’ suicide is that she died in response to being dragged on Twitter after making homophobic comments.