A dog’s breakfast
Notes on John Hughes’s plagiarism scandalSeptember 2005
Arts & Letters
‘In My Skin’ by Kate Holden
The road to junkiedom and prostitution is littered with cliches. Kate Holden’s memoir – the tale of a good Melbourne girl who becomes a heroin-addicted prostitute – mostly avoids the romanticism that often plagues such stories. She’s not averse to shock value and In My Skin contains occasionally lurid moments, but not at the cost of genuine fidelity to the finer points of her experience. If her reasons for turning to smack and sex work read like indulgent undergraduate experimentation, that’s because she was a restless student, eager to test her boundaries. And if the junkie section – revisiting again and again the grind of scoring, the bliss of the hit – drifts along aimlessly, it’s because junkie life is like that.
Holden’s deft writing is most resonant when she traces her move from hustling on the streets to working in brothels. She comments as insider and outsider, as prostitute and writer: “The more I saw of the meek, the bored, the frustrated, the more I glimpsed how our society works.” One client becomes a friend; another finds her hitting the panic button. The vulnerable camaraderie among the prostitutes makes for compelling reading. “The girls were my social life ... a strange little community, brimming with intimacy, blocked by secrets.” In this world, Holden finds an ambivalent emancipation, perhaps the only sort. She concedes a few regrets, mostly to do with her long-suffering parents. But ultimately she’s not after absolution or redemption.
“I sometimes wondered, with my legs spread over the face of some eager man, if I felt regret for the invasion of my secret spaces.” Her answer? “I am still me.”
App trap: ‘Chloe’
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Standing and ceremony: The 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial
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‘Trespasses’
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Alienations and fantasies of escape unify the stories in Australian author Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collection
‘Loveland’
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‘We Own This City’
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, returns to Baltimore for a present-day examination of rapacious police corruptionA dog’s breakfast
Notes on John Hughes’s plagiarism scandalApp trap: ‘Chloe’
‘Sex Education’ writer Alice Seabright’s new psychological thriller probing social media leads this month’s streaming highlights‘The Picasso Century’ at the NGV
The NGV’s exhibition offers a fascinating history of the avant-garde across the Spanish artist’s lifetime
Two sides of the same Shields?
Editor Bevan Shields’ attempts to handle the backlash over his masthead’s treatment of Rebel Wilson points to the dismal and fragile state of news media
