Not for the fainthearted (In My Skin: A Memoir - Kate Holden)

Member Name: Coxy1974

Product:	In My Skin: A Memoir - Kate Holden
Date:	01/06/07 (144 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Made for a good read

Disadvantages: Uncomfortable and frustrating

I was given this book by a friend after she had read it – I won’t bore you with her comments but she’d intrigued me so I had to read it.

I love any kind of books really and once I have started to read one I will always make sure I finish no matter how hard going the book may be. So what did I think of this one.

The book is written by Kate Holden and it is a true story. If follows her life and in it she shares her thoughts and experiences living in Melbourne, Australia. The daughter of loving parents and with one sibling they seemed like the ideal family. Kate begins the book by sharing her earliest child hood memories and recounts feeling different from other children.

Basically a shy person and a dreamer, Kate quite often hid herself away to fantasise about a different life. She recounts how at one point at a party, the children had all been given boxes, crayons etc to play with and make something but she hid herself away in her box because it made her feel safe and she refused to come out. Growing up into a teenager Kate went on to University to study Classics and worked in a Bookshop. This is where she met James.

Moving in with each other in a flat in St Kilda she quickly begins to notice that James and their circle of friends ‘disappear’ quite regularly and James confesses that he uses Heroin. Kate is enthralled by this and wants to try it. James resists letting her try it but Kate is insistent and it doesn’t really seem to take much to persuade James and his friends to help her along the way.

Kate describes her first ‘taste’ of the drug as something that she didn’t really notice any effect so she thought she needed to try again before she could say that she had really ‘tried’ the drug and describe it’s effects on her. So she goes for a second hit.

This book really isn’t for the fainthearted and if you are offended by references to sex and drugs then please stop here.

Kate describes in great detail what it feels like, the needle pricking the skin and watching the blood cloud the syringe before injecting the drug into her vein. She describes the feeling of relaxation and numbness that comes over you after a ‘taste’.

Kate goes onto describe how she descends into a life of drug dependency and prostitution. Her dealer lives across the road from the flat she and James share. They go into rehab together at Kate’s parents insistence and the attempt fails. Struggling for money James goes into rehab on his own and leaves Kate to become more and more involved with her dealer and his prostitute girlfriend. He’s all too eager to help Kate to get into the world of prostitution after she steals from the bookshop she works in and after being discovered she’s sacked.

At first Kate works the streets of St Kilda, calling herself Lucy and describes in great detail her first client. She describes her body and being separated from her mind and that selling sex was just another job to her. After being arrested Kate decides to move from selling herself on the streets to a legal organised brothel. Here she is introduced to a whole new world of prostitution and different names for different sex acts. She describes the clients as people that she helps to overcome certain problems. She describes the horror side to it as well, the times she was brutalised and the injuries she sustained from a 12 hour shift in a brothel.

All the while she describes her clamouring need for Heroin and the grip it has over her. How she couldn’t believe the amount of money she made from her shifts at the brothel and how it would nearly all be spent on drugs and cigarettes. Her parents despair but try to understand how and why Kate turned to drugs in the first place and desperately try to wean her off them. She has two unsuccessful attempts in rehab and after verbally abusing her mother when she finds Heroin on her and flushes it down the loo they ask her to leave. When her parents find out she works as a prostitute they accept the fact but don’t like it – Kate describes her mother constantly trying to persuade her to go into rehab and to get clean and be safe.

I found the book to be a fascinating story of the life that Kate led. At times I wanted to physically shake her and shout ‘Wake up to what you are doing to yourself and your family’ and once I actually put the book down in frustration, much to my partners amusement when he asked ‘Good book?’ and I replied ‘Yes but I want to kill her!’

Kate tells of how the drugs made her body so numb she rarely got any sexual pleasure and how she viewed her body as a means to an end. How she’d soak up the adoration of the men she serviced.

Kate goes on about hiding her bag of clean syringes etc under bushes whilst she worked the streets, exchanging dirty for clean, the bad drugs that she had, the times when she snorted cocaine with clients and took speed to stay awake so that she could work more hours to get more money for drugs and the withdrawal effects that she suffered for going without them.

She talks about the different sex acts she performed on men and women and how she sometimes gave away freebies or lowered prices to get more customers if she was having a slow night. How liberating it was sexually to be working in a brothel and the identity of Lucy gave her the courage to be more adventurous. She describes how it felt to have sex with another woman upon request of one of her clients and the trepidation she felt at doing this for the first time.

There appeared to be nothing in the early stages of Kate’s life to indicate that she would fall into a habit of using drugs and it does beg the question of why? Throughout reading the book I felt deep sympathy for her parents and sister who seemed to suffer the most. Indeed, Kate describes deep feelings of shame and guilt for everything that she put them through.

Throughout it appeared that she still had strong family links and reading between the lines I got the impression that her family would have had her back like a shot if she chose to come home and get clean. Her mother constantly worried about her and the phone calls and visits home that Kate describes, leave her with a feeling of being loved.

I hope never to be in a position like Kates parents – they must have constantly been asking themselves where they went wrong and what they did wrong. They must have been wondering how they could help their daughter even after she lied to them and stole money from them to pay for her drug habit.

My sympathies also lay with Kate. However, at times I was infuriated with her. I’ve never taken drugs and never felt the temptation even though some of my friends do take drugs and I have been present when they have. So with never having experienced that particular addiction I cannot comment on how easy it is to get clean.

What I couldn’t understand was Kate’s reluctance to get clean. All the way through the book she describes this hold that Heroin has over you but you sense that there was never a desperation to get clean. At times she would describe her living conditions and a longing to be back how she used to be when she lived with her parents but doesn’t portray a desire to give up Heroin.

She displays indifference to the fact that she prostitutes herself and states that she was actually proud of what she did. If people asked her what she did for a job she would tell them straight. It was that simple to Kate. I willed her to be strong and give up the drug and cheered when she finally went on a Methadone program to wean her off Heroin.

There is a picture of her in the back of the book and I purposely didn’t look at it until I’d read the book. I was already halfway through it before my friend told me about it. I like to be able to build up a mental picture of the characters I am reading about but I can tell you I was way off base. Nothing at all like I expected.

The beginning of the book is the best written for me whereas other, later parts of the book feel a little ‘padded out’ to lengthen the book. It’s not that she doesn’t have a story to tell but I did sometimes wonder why lines such as ‘We’d gather together in the lounge to be looked over again and again’ were repeated several times through out the book when she described working in the brothel.

I actually started to read it at work on the same day I was given it. On the whole it took me about three weeks to finish the book and this isn’t because it is a thick book. It’s 292 pages long but due to the nature of the book and the different emotions I experienced whilst reading it I found I was only able to manage a chapter or a little bit more every time I picked it up.

I got my copy for free but if you fancy a thought provoking read then it’s available from Amazon for £5.24 in Paperback.

Published by Canongate Books it was first published in August 2005 and my copy was printed in 2007. ISBN 9781920885908.

Summary: A very good book indeed even if I did want to throttle her in certain places!