Some of their stories were straight-up weird. Some were very sad. I still can’t bear to re-listen to some of the audio files because they were so painful to hear the first time. Some were hilarious. Some were gross. With some, I wished I had experienced them myself because they sounded so fun. So many stories started with something like, “Well, you know Spike, and he and Randy went one night ...,” and then I’d have to interject: “Actually, no, I don’t know Spike.” So, then I’d get the whole story about Spike and then the whole story about Randy and then the one about the time their band played at some club up the street. Finally, I’d circle back to the Clermont and get what I needed for the book.

It was really tough to decipher what was important to the women. I wanted honesty, but I never wanted to exploit them. So I began asking myself questions. Do I include interviews from people on drugs? Do I include stories that seem to change overnight? What part is the truth? Do I include stories about women who were no longer working at the Clermont?

I just tried to use my best judgment. I tried to approach the project bearing the heaviness of a single question: If this were my sister or daughter, what would I want the world to know about her? But I could never forget that a night at the Clermont Lounge is an incredibly good time. It’s one of the best dive bars in the country.

Through the interviews I realized how getting dealt just one shitty hand could alter the course of a woman’s life. Porsha, the oldest dancer at the Clermont, works to support a loved one with a chronic, debilitating ailment. She had one story that always stuck with me. She used to get ready in the restroom, separate from the other women. One day, a customer stared at her and laughed. Porsha looked at her and said, “One day, you could be me, honey.”

From the outside, these women might look like freaks. But when I learned about their lives, it was different. I was a freak, too. We were all leading dual lives. Who we all were at the lounge and who we were at home were very different.

Many of the dancers told me about cheering at their kids’ softball games, waiting in car-pool lines and living in the suburbs, only to drive in to the city to shake it on stage at night.

In the first year I was a fixture at the Clermont Lounge, I worked as DailyCandy’s Atlanta editor and then later as an editor for MSN. During the day, I was writing about restaurant openings, boutiques hosting designer trunk shows, and mustached bartenders creating craft cocktails for $12 a pop. But at night, I’d pull my hair back into a low ponytail, change into dark skinny jeans and a tank top, tie my Puma sneakers tight, and throw on my black Santa Cruz skateboard zip hoodie gifted from my twin sister in California, ready to work at the Clermont Lounge.

At first, I had felt like an out-of-place teenager during high school lunch, trying to lock eyes with the first dancer I could find, hoping she’d befriend me. Soon, I turned to bribery. I brought the dancers things. I was sent samples all the time for my day job. Free bottles of beauty products — dry shampoo, moisturizer, lip gloss — I’d take them to the dressing room at the Clermont Lounge, and the dayside girls like Hetty and Cynthia would get so excited. This was a new role for me, because in my actual high school experience, I was the cheerleader who dated the quarterback.

What makes people do what they do for a living? What makes one dance at the Clermont Lounge? What makes me want to write? I believe we are all trying to make a living, in an oftentimes cruel world, the best way we know how. Best I can tell, the women of the Clermont Lounge are there for one reason only—to make money. For whatever brought them there, this is their job. And perhaps naively or too empathetically, I came to the conclusion that the women of the Clermont had different choices in their lives than I was given. They were dealt different hands than I’d been dealt. Perhaps — without my college degree or the father who could bail me out when I got into trouble or the decent first boyfriend — my life could have been theirs. Some had first climbed the Clermont Lounge stage on a whim, thinking they’d make quick cash. But several decades later, they were still dancing to the same old songs and having the same conversations about not making enough money and how hard life is.

But somehow, they survived.