Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary

I never kept a diary, except for one year of my life. The year I turned fourteen. The year my parents divorced. The year I had sex for the first time. The year I learned to use the microfiche. 

In this unique follow-up to her memoir You Probably Think This Song Is About You, Kate Camp turns her poet’s eye on her 1986 diary.

Reading The Diary in its entirety for the first time, she revels in 80s touchstones like Revlon Custom Eyes and Ghostbusters on VHS. But amid the daily details, like smoking menthols in Suzy’s Coffee Lounge and wearing Jazzercise tights in a phone box, are moments of drama, even tragedy – being black-out drunk in a spa pool, or watching her father move out of the family home. At the centre of it all is Cameron, his black hair falling over his eyes, intoning in his fake Scottish accent, ‘Treat me rough, baby.’

These entries – over 100 reproduced in full – are a time capsule of a very different era. The Kate Camp of today responds to the blithe accounts of sex, drugs and risk-taking with horror and admiration. How real are our memories? Can we ever know ourselves? And why is every entry signed off Leather & Chains?