Body Shell Girl ebook (EPUB)
think of my body as a shell
that I could vacate, not as metaphor, or symbol
but as a real possibility
Body Shell Girl is a memoir in verse about the first two years of a decade that Rose Hunter spent in the sex industry in Canada. When Rose walked into a massage parlour in Toronto in 1997, she was looking for a temporary fix to pay rent and avoid having to go back to her home country of Australia.
Awkward, shy and looking for a place to belong, she found herself in a strange world she understood little about, other than here she could make more than rent. She planned to use her earnings to buy herself an education that would secure the career of her dreams.
Naively believing she could do only what was required of her, without trauma or side effects and leave the industry on her own terms, she was shattered by what unfolded.
This is her story. It is also a searing portrayal of this dehumanising industry in all its destructive power.
Trauma can destroy narrative or it can create a firestorm – in Body Shell Girl Rose Hunter has ploughed her memory and her ‘radioactive’ journals to take us not just inside the debilitating machinations of her time in the sex industry but right inside the experience itself. A highly visceral reading experience that left me body-shocked and reeling. In Body Shell Girl Hunter annihilates misogynist fantasy word by word, page by page.
—Sally Breen, author of The Casuals and Atomic City
Body Shell Girl is incredible. It is a captivating and honest account of a woman’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings in the sex trade. Communicated with authenticity, you feel as if Rose is an old friend by the end of the book: she gives a voice to sisters who are too often unheard.
—Cherry Smiley, from the Nlaka’pamux and Diné Nations, founder of Women’s Studies Online, Canada
2022 | Ebook | 160 pp