Book Review: Kate Holden's In My Skin Doesn't Hold Back

My brother has very interesting taste in nonfiction books and he was the one who bought this in one of our trips abroad.

In My Skin by Kate Holden is not an easy book to read - in fact, it is a bit bewildering to read because it is an honest memoir about the author's descent to hell and back.

Hell being her drug-addicted self (heroin) and selling her body first on the streets, and then in a brothel in Melbourne, Australia, just so she can feed her drug habit.

What makes it difficult to read is accepting all the 'wrong' choices the author makes in her life so much so that she puts herself in a situation where her life has become that of a cockroach.

She's not poor. She finished a university degree - in Australia! She was never abused as a child - she had loving parents and a sister who looked up to her.

How did it all go wrong?

It was her drug use that got the best of her - and those were the parts that alternately made me roll up my eyes and yet I plodded on reading it - because there is something about another human being on a free fall of her choice that gives us the scare.

If she can fall down on her life just like that - we can too, if we fail to get a grip.

I haven't read a book (fiction or nonfiction) that has put a 'positive' spin on prostitution.

Well, Pretty Woman, the movie was a different kind of hooker movie - but we are familiar with the sad reality of what prostitutes really go through.

It is not a career any woman (or man) would want to aspire for! Yet in this memoir, the author achingly writes about what the trade has taught her - and the reader can alternate between disgust and fascination.

The fantasy of being sexy and desirable and sleeping with all the gorgeous men looks great in the fantasy world - but in reality - as a means to feed one's drug habit - it would look quite pitiful and sordid.

But Holden writes none of that. This is what happened to her and she tells it like it is.

At one point, I really thought she wouldn't get out of her drug habit, but she did - and she has this book to prove it.