AustLit

'About halfway through Tilly Lawless’s debut book, Nothing But My Body, the narrator thinks about how sex work is similar to many other jobs. She is like an athlete, required to keep fit. A nurse, paid to enter into intimate proximity with other people’s bodies. A therapist, who talks her male clients through the inner pain they would never dare unveil to a psychologist. A performer, a babysitter, an actor, a diplomat … but the roll call is interrupted as she washes semen off her hands after a job. “My work is quite similar to so many things, but not quite any of them, and it doesn’t need a euphemism,” she thinks. “I am just a whore and I’m okay with that.” Lawless, like her protagonist, is a young, queer sex worker from northern NSW. Until now, she has mostly used her online platform to speak about her personal experiences within the sex industry, in an attempt to dismantle everyday stigma that sex workers come up against. This new work of autofiction is likewise an unshrinking portrayal of modern sex work and all it entails: a rolodex of clients good, bad and ugly; sly texts to friends and condoms spilling out of purses as strategies to stay safe; the specific brand of uncertainty and fear wrought by the coronavirus pandemic; and an enduring stigma that raises its head in ways both cliched and unexpected.' (Introduction)

'In her early 20s, Kathryn Heyman spent a season aboard a six-berth fishing trawler, Ocean Thief, that was scouring the Gulf of Carpentaria for tiger prawns. She’d hitchhiked up the coast from Sydney with a handful of clothes, a flick-knife she didn’t know how to use, and 10kg of books. It was an escape plan without a plan: “I had no deadline, no outcome, no-one waiting,” Heyman explains in Fury. “There was no-one to care for me, only myself, and I had never learned the lessons of caring.” She arrived on deck as Kacey, an untested galley cook who couldn’t fry an egg; she left as Kathryn, a toil-hardened deckhand. It was a transformation – a strengthening – that made other transformations possible.' (Introduction)