THE ROMANTIC: ITALIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS BY KATE HOLDEN, TEXT PUBLISHING, $32.95.
Plot-wise, Kate Holden’s latest memoir is a bit like the very dark sister of Eat, Pray, Love. A woman heads to Italy in search of romance, adventure and knowledge. She eats well, struggles with the language, has lots of great sex and constantly examines her own actions and motives, before finding a strange sort of peace and heading home.
Yet there the similarities end. Kate Holden carries heavy baggage. Over five years in her 20s, as described in her previous book, In My Skin, she went from Melbourne honours grad to heroin user and sex worker – and somewhere along this squalid path discovered her own clear, graceful voice as an author. I found Holden’s sexual choices in this book distinctly unromantic, even confronting, and suspect many other women readers will, too. Yet it is a compelling study of damage.
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