For author Kate Holden, heroin, honesty and being a hooker became the inspiration behind her two much loved memoirs about her time on the street and how being a former sex worker and heroin addict changed her life.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
“I knew from the start that I wanted to be candid and honest about everything I put myself through,” she said.
What Kate expressed most during her time on stage was how terrified she was to publish In My Skin for the first time, only to find out that so many people around her had battled with the same kind of problems and were supportive of her decision to document her experiences.
“I never thought I was that interesting. I always thought I was really dorky. My real reason for writing was to describe what I was seeing. It wasn’t what I was expecting but I started taking notes and then I traveled to Italy and had a think about it writing about by world was something I really wanted to do. Eventually I started a Graduate Diploma in writing and my teacher told me to just start writing,” she said.
“I’ve had women and young adults, older men and teenagers come up to me and tell me how much they liked and could understand what I was going through.”
Kate stated that from the beginning she had never been secretive about the fact she was a sex worker and that she had never sought to hid her drug problem from people either.
“I guess I wanted people to know that just because you have a drug problem, and just because you’re a sex worker, it doesn’t make you a bad person. I wanted to express upon my readers that the word is not what you expect and the things I write about are a little closer to home than you may realise,” she said.
During her talk, Kate read a passage from her first book In My Skin about working on the street in St Kilda during winter while addicted to heroin and doing everything she could to score another hit.
“I’m pleased that so many different types of people have read an enjoyed my books because there’s a lot of confronting things inside them,” she said.
“I’ve had women and young adults, older men and teenagers come up to me and tell me how much they liked and could understand what I was going through.”
In My Skin and The Romantic are full of wonderful little anecdotes that tell the story of what it was really like to need a heroin fix every eight hours and be sleeping with men for money because it was something she wanted to do, not something she had been forced into.
“For me, I just wanted to be as honest as possible. And I think I was more honest about what I did then people were expecting,” she said.
