An impromptu review at half time: Kate Holden In My Skin
Entry posted by Megan Delaney
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My keepers, why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.
- Beckett
I am reading Kate Holden’s In my skin, a memoir. I am a not a fan of writing reviews before finishing but I’ve been wanting – no needing – to talk about In my skin. Isn’t a book you can mull over with non-industry friends, in a book club or something. I can’t stomach the non-industry Amazon reviews because all you get, is ‘is Lucy really you?’ And the whole it’s a modern day, mean streets play within a play. At worst, Holden is a junkie, it’s hard to believe what’s she says when someone brags about her love of addiction; I can’t relate to it, and so go the Amazon reviews. Many comment on the intricacy, almost serenading of addiction, even for a drug memoir. Forget talking to friends, who’d be like Amazon, I blushed reading Holden’s work in public and prayed no one looked over my shoulder as I often curiously do. Several times when I’ve been reading Holden’s love of fits (injecting equipment) and the drive for blowjobs waitresses have frowned and commented “is everything okay?” In my skin is the most engrossing novel I’ve read for a long time, and one I hope you read too.
Holden deserves all the critical praises and her resulting cult following, for coming out as a junkie sorry “addict” and a working girl. Let me be clear – I loathed the first fifty pages. I fall into the category of her audience who read (or are reading) the book for sex and prostitution, not the drugs. Fantasy novels. Middleclass, caring family. Academic high achiever. Artsy boyfriend leads to grass. Pott leads to H. Smack leads to street sex. Junkiehood leads to in and out of rehab. Street sex leads to parlour work. And if Holden had gone to Catholic school it would be nauseatingly stereotypical. In the first quarter Holden is still processing her childhood and pace the book stagers under the weight of her wondering, her melancholy. You’ll enjoy the first part more then I if you like teenybopper angst soul-searching. You might want to use her story as an education tool for saying no to drugs, it’d go down good as a HSC text if you could get past the screeching parents. Holden was naïve, we get it, how many pages do you need to portray such self-involved glum? Some would call her affairs with young boys romantic (Holden herself) but I wanted to shoot myself.
Yet, I kept reading page after page. Even if you don’t like drugs and junkies (which I don’t) you can find grace and lyricism in her writing, compelling you to turn page after page. Other drug memoirs and their ghost writers could learn a thing or two from Holden. If you’re looking for a memoir stronger than Whiteline fever, or Sex and thugs and rock 'n' roll, but from a relative nobody, you will adore Holden’s honest take on good girls gone bad in Australian suburbia circa 1990s. If you like Choke and Trainspotting you’ll love Holden.
I am up to where Holden, or should I say Lucy, starts working in a parlour, a step up from the streets. Reading through her street days I kept thinking page after page, when is Holden going to get her shit together and go indoors. Watching Hung, you know you’re following a storyline written by a working man or woman. Quadruple this feeling: Holden’s antidotes and client talk establish ho cred. In my skin is worth your time if you want to know what really goes on in parlours.
The self-assurance in Holden’s reminiscing of real life sex work is obvious, a confidence and candour I believe is lacking in the first few chapters as she walks us through becoming a junkie. I understand why her words are more sensible in parlour land, then on the junkie mean streets. Holden found a passion and safety in her parlour work, until this discovery she was consumed with the rapture and degradation of addiction. I get mad when people say advertising is not real; the persona you’re putting out there is self-promotion, marketing minus authenticity. Marketing is like a sneer at sole providers. So far, Holden is beautifully describing how becoming a sex worker can help you become who you are, how sex work gives you permission to be yourself. A personality who is still very much you but more than you.
I am not talking about fucking for money, making it rich, sex work as a life calling or professional career. In Holden’s own words, she describes the process of learning to sell sex and yourself;
It wasn’t so much constructing a personality, for me, as extrapolating one. It was as if we all enlarged ourselves from who we were in real life, but exaggerated. A halo of personality to shield our all-too accessible flesh. All my humour, all my independence, my candour, and my sexuality I’d muffled in my younger days, I now wore proudly – self-consciously at first , as I developed Lucy’s character, and then more comfortably. Lucy was me, but more so. It was a surprise to find myself confident, once I had territory to be confident in; raunchy, once I felt raunchiness wasn’t embarrassing; witty, once there was an arena for wit. I marveled at how I could adjust my character; from gauche to coy, from ingenious to dominating. Never ceasing to be myself, but shifting aspects as the face of the person across the room changed from hour to hour.
I realised my figure, too, was changing. I’d always hated my body and shrouded it in over-sized clothes. Now I drew gazes towards my breasts, my curved waist, my legs. For the first time in my life I began to consider my body something to glory in. I stood taller. And when I bought a new dress, it was tight. (p153)
I think one of the most potent attractions of the industry, as Holden puts it, is being comfortable in your mind and skin.
With a growing ethos of commercialization and gentrification in the media with hit shows like Satisfaction, or Secret Diary of a Call Girl, we can easily forget what makes paid sex so enthralling. I don’t think the extrapolating personality is only for the working girl. The value paid sex gives our routine lives are incalculable. Imagine if we didn’t have a valve, and space to be a little more than what we can be in our everyday lives. To hit above our weight with pretty girls. To cuddle and chat naked. As hard as such words like service, consumer, value for money try to cement service certainty, one thing is always forgotten: you can’t quantify passion. I know when I walk out from a really good appointment I may be exhausted, but my mind is so much clearer. I feel much more in touch with me, at home in my skin. The poignancy of In my skin is Holden’s reminder of our involvedness in our bodies, our minds, vis-à-vis the industry.
If In my skin were to be intermeshed with what was going on in the law, drug and sex industry as a whole in the 1990s, we’d have a masterpiece on our hands. It would give The Wire a run for its money. Holden’s character Lucy would correct an overall lack of intelligent and distinct female protagonists in present-day television crime drama. The vividness of Holden’s sexperience in her own worlds would make Underbelly or Satisfaction cartoon kitsch. Holden’s intelligence is so translatable to film it could be more successful than Candy, after Wolfcreek and Snowtown, Australian directors have more license then ever to go into sordid, graphic detail. Imagine seeing Lucy on an international flight.
As you can see I am that involved with In my skin. And you will be too. Just make sure your wife doesn’t catch you reading… because why would a nice man like you be reading about sex workers? Why would I be reading about sex workers in such wretched detail? In your skin is no Satisfaction or Secret Dairies of a Call Girl. Make sure you buckle your seat belt. You’ll be blushing one moment, furious the next, then stupefied and horny all in the space of one chapter. We’ve all see a girl like Holden, we’ve despised her, or pitied her, or maybe even bonked her. Moral judgments aside I can’t stop thinking about how well she nails sex and interweaves her antidotes together to create suspense on every single page once you get past the first bit. I’d read Holden’s work just for her brothel musings because I know I’ve been the new girl and tried to find my own skin, to find Megan, and I continue to do so with every great session I have, sometimes even with difficult clients. I will continue to read and report once I’ve finished,,,.
Megan
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