Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary

Temporarily out of stock

It is a dangerous thing to be a
teenage girl.

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 to the rollercoaster entries of her 1986 diary, when she was 13 going on 14.

Reading the entirety of its handwritten pages for
the first time, she revels in the 80s touchstones, from Revlon Custom Eyes
to 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. And 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.’

The diary
entries – over 100 reproduced in full – are a time capsule of a very different
era. The Kate Camp of today responds to their 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 and Chains?

Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Imprint: Te Herenga Waka University Press
Publication date: 12/02/2026