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You Probably Think This Song is About You
In these disarming true stories, Kate Camp moves back and forth through the smoke-filled rooms of her life: from a nostalgic childhood of the Seventies and Eighties, through the boozy pothead years of the Nineties, and into the sobering reality of a world in which Hillary Clinton did not win.
‘Never apologise, never explain’, Kate’s mother used to say, and whether visiting her boyfriend in prison, canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace, in a corporate toilet with sodden underwear, or facing the doctor at an IVF clinic, she doesn’t.
The result is a memoir brimming with hard-won wisdom and generous humour; a story that, above all, rings true.
‘Never apologise, never explain’, Kate’s mother used to say, and whether visiting her boyfriend in prison, canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace, in a corporate toilet with sodden underwear, or facing the doctor at an IVF clinic, she doesn’t.
The result is a memoir brimming with hard-won wisdom and generous humour; a story that, above all, rings true.
- GenresNonfictionMemoirEssays
224 pages, Paperback
Published July 14, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 3, 2023
I think this is outstanding. i had no idea really what I was taking on when starting this. I kind of knew who Kate Camp was - reasonably well known NZ poet/writer, but had not read anything by her. She was one of the participants in a wonderful event we have here in Auckland called the Literatea. Each writer has 20 minutes to talk about their book and read an excerpt from it. Her excerpt was a chapter called 'My Mother the Crime Scene'. A rich and heart wrenching account of a home invasion attack on her elderly mother. So at the end of the event I bought the book. It is not a big book, but written with such eye-opening honesty, clarity and insight, and above all courage. We are all a product of our own history, and boy does Kate Camp have a history. The chapter about her mother is actually the tamest in the whole book. This is a woman, now just 50, who has really lived a life, and somehow come out the other side, it would seem relatively intact. Most of the memoir is set in Wellington and Kapiti Coast, areas very familiar to me, and I loved reading of her love for this part of NZ. Plus I am going to hunt out more writings by Kate Camp. She is amazing.
September 28, 2022
Firstly please don't take my rating as an indication that the book wasn't good. It was chosen by a member of our book group otherwise I definitely would never have read this, as I am not familiar with Kate Camp at all and have not read any of her poetry or publications. One of the main reasons that I read memoirs is if I am familiar with the author or interested in the story or part of their life they are writing about. This was not the case for me with Kate's book. I also read this on the back of Noelle McCarthy's memoirs, in which the writing was superlative and the book told a story so you could get invested in it. Kate's memoirs were really just chapters of things that happened in her life, collectively grouped together, but they didn't weave into a story. Growing up in NZ in a similar timeframe to Kate, there were many things I could relate to in her book (taping songs onto a cassette from the radio, Fleur cigarettes, tie-dyed clothing. the NZ music scene etc) but did I really need or want to read about every incident that Kate could recall where she wet herself (from childhood through to adulthood) absolutely not...and why would you want to share stuff like this? I would challenge anyone readying this to say they enjoyed that chapter...it was just weird for me. It was neither humorous not enlightening. Other chapters went on in a similar theme and I found myself skimming them, as at times they seemed repetitive and bogged down in narrative. If you are a Kate Camp fan, you may enjoy the insight into her background and life and the journey she has taken to become successful in her field. One thing I really did like (and was intrigued with) was the book cover, and she does mentions this in the Acknowledgements that it came from Te Papa, so at least I found that out.
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December 30, 2022[Note - all text in quotes comes from Kate's book]
Kate Camp - Wellingtonian, poet, comms professional - has just released her memoir, You probably think this song is about you, through Te Herenga Waka University Press. I read it all in one go yesterday.
In her interview yesterday with Kim Hill, Kate talked about the process of writing the book: of selecting a topic, and then writing and writing and writing until she hit the nugget. Then starting from that nugget, and writing all the way back.
The memoir could be classed as a story of growing up female, from 1972 to now. It moves between personal nostalgia (the close cataloguing of the contents and smells of her grandparents' home in Hastings; school assembly song choices), coming of age drama (drinking, smoking, sex), revelations of the kind we have become familiar with in women's writing (fertility battles, the small casual cruelties of childlessness) and revelations few would ever be frank enough to admit (a chapter on wetting herself, as child and adult). Threaded through this are long-running storylines: a long-term relationship characterised by addiction and abuse; the suicide of a close friend; a loving family; an abundance of close shaves and second chances.
Kate and I work together - she's the Head of Marketing and Communications at Te Papa. I have only known her since I joined Te Papa, so many of the aspects and history of Kate that come through the memoir are, to me, just that, history. The memoir largely cuts off before the time I met her, and the smoke-soaked Kate of the book is understandable, but not quite familiar. She reminds me a lot, actually, of my older cousin Kim, who would be Kate's senior by a couple of years: another over-achieving uni drop-out, another Greenpeace canvasser, a head girl gone rogue, a pot smoker with lung-choked gurgle of a laugh, a wry accepter of everybody's foibles and flaws
Aspects of the book horrify me - in the sense of a horror movie, of watching circumstances mount up in such a way that you just know how they will play out. A young teen who can dress up in her mum's clothes and blag her way into Courtenay Place pubs. A young teen who's hanging out a 41-year-old pot-dealer's house. A young teen who doesn't value her body or her beauty, trading them off for the things she wants, which become the things she needs. A teen who enters into an abusive relationship and then stays there, a teen who bad things are happening to and who's being bad herself, being the baddest version of herself. A kid who can even then apply what I know of Kate today, the relentless logic of risk-management and a superhuman ability to manage a situation through to an acceptable conclusion:
The thing I find remarkable about the book - knowing Kate well, but not to the point of intimacy - is that while she has learned and been taught to be compassionate with herself, she does not let herself off the hook. There is an honesty that is not seeking approbation or thrills: it has just been tracked down, drawn forth, and written to the point of inevitability.
I'm familiar with that card. For me, it's my widowhood - ten years old this year. "My first husband died. He killed himself." It's a statement that absolves me of all responsibility. I'm not at all responsible. And yet, of course, I am.
Another point of similarity is that we're both under-reactors:
Some of this is having thick natural buffers, a capacity to keep your head while others, etc. Part of it (for myself) is what I think of as burnt-off emotional nerve-endings, meaning I spend a lot of time observing my emotions rather than feeling them. There's a bit of Scottish parsimoniousness (even though emotions are free), of it not being worth the effort, and some distaste for making a fuss, being a mess. At 12 or 14 I can remember trying to get a good crying jag up over some teenage injustice, standing in front of the mirror to watch myself sob, and giving up because I just wasn't that into it. Two men have left me (one to suicide, one to another woman), because, they said, in their different ways, I know you'll cope. Which is another way of saying I know you won't make this hard for me.
Kate writes about going to a doctor for abdominal pain, and being told there's a chance she has ovarian cancer:
Many many years ago I watched a tv series called something like Child of Our Times. It was probably a turn of the millennium thing. In it, a jovial child development expert tracked the progress of a group of kids all born at the same time.
One episode has never left me. The kids would've been about four. They were testing the kids' ability to recognise and describe emotions. They set up a test where the kids listened to a taped recording of a voice actor reading recipes, in Italian, with exaggerated emotion in her voice: great sadness, great happiness, great fear. The kids were given printed sheets of cartoon faces to hold up, matching the smiley or crying face to the emotion in the recording.
The kids by and large did fairly well, but one child - a little blonde girl - failed spectacularly. She kept holding up the smiley face whenever the voice actor's rendition ached with sadness. And this was odd because this kid was preternaturally attuned, an old soul. Her family was under some form of stress (perhaps the parents were on the fringe of breaking up?) and she shuttled around, settling things down. So the jovial child development expert delved in, and asked her about the face/voice mis-match. And she said It's important people think you're happy, even when you're sad. The tenderness, sadness and self-recognition I felt in that moment still haunt me.
Kate writes:
In her acknowledgements, Kate talks about her dad's reaction to the book. Her dad loves her: both her parents do, and she them, and the largely untroubled nature of that loving is one of the things that balance out the horror movie bits. But he's upset that the book focuses on all the bruises on the apple of Kate's life, and doesn't reflect its shine: her happy marriage, her successful career, her publishing record, her literary fame, her solidity in the world. Why is she painting herself in such an unflattering light?
There's a passage in the book that sums up for me the wisdom of Kate Camp. In her interview with Kim Hill, Kate passingly references a "not very startling self-realisation of the Covid era", and this is one of these. It's not a unique realisation but you just know she has lived in, in a thousand humdrum moments that may well make her wince to recall, but that are irresistible because when she writes them down, they make a hell of a good story:
Kate Camp - Wellingtonian, poet, comms professional - has just released her memoir, You probably think this song is about you, through Te Herenga Waka University Press. I read it all in one go yesterday.
In her interview yesterday with Kim Hill, Kate talked about the process of writing the book: of selecting a topic, and then writing and writing and writing until she hit the nugget. Then starting from that nugget, and writing all the way back.
The memoir could be classed as a story of growing up female, from 1972 to now. It moves between personal nostalgia (the close cataloguing of the contents and smells of her grandparents' home in Hastings; school assembly song choices), coming of age drama (drinking, smoking, sex), revelations of the kind we have become familiar with in women's writing (fertility battles, the small casual cruelties of childlessness) and revelations few would ever be frank enough to admit (a chapter on wetting herself, as child and adult). Threaded through this are long-running storylines: a long-term relationship characterised by addiction and abuse; the suicide of a close friend; a loving family; an abundance of close shaves and second chances.
Kate and I work together - she's the Head of Marketing and Communications at Te Papa. I have only known her since I joined Te Papa, so many of the aspects and history of Kate that come through the memoir are, to me, just that, history. The memoir largely cuts off before the time I met her, and the smoke-soaked Kate of the book is understandable, but not quite familiar. She reminds me a lot, actually, of my older cousin Kim, who would be Kate's senior by a couple of years: another over-achieving uni drop-out, another Greenpeace canvasser, a head girl gone rogue, a pot smoker with lung-choked gurgle of a laugh, a wry accepter of everybody's foibles and flaws
Aspects of the book horrify me - in the sense of a horror movie, of watching circumstances mount up in such a way that you just know how they will play out. A young teen who can dress up in her mum's clothes and blag her way into Courtenay Place pubs. A young teen who's hanging out a 41-year-old pot-dealer's house. A young teen who doesn't value her body or her beauty, trading them off for the things she wants, which become the things she needs. A teen who enters into an abusive relationship and then stays there, a teen who bad things are happening to and who's being bad herself, being the baddest version of herself. A kid who can even then apply what I know of Kate today, the relentless logic of risk-management and a superhuman ability to manage a situation through to an acceptable conclusion:
I spent ten years of my teens and twenties with an one-again-off-again boyfriend, and we used to fight like that all the time. I remember our downstairs neighbour saying to me one time, When I hear you guys fight, and I can hear things smashing and breaking, and I hear you screaming, when should I call the police? And I didn't skip a beat, didn't think, I wonder if that's a rhetorical question. I just said, I'll call out to you. If I ever call your name, go straight next door and call the cops. He didn't have a phone.
The thing I find remarkable about the book - knowing Kate well, but not to the point of intimacy - is that while she has learned and been taught to be compassionate with herself, she does not let herself off the hook. There is an honesty that is not seeking approbation or thrills: it has just been tracked down, drawn forth, and written to the point of inevitability.
Even though it's the truth, it feels unfair and somehow cheap for me to write about Jimi's anger, his violence. It's like playing a card that changes the meaning of everything, makes it black-and-white. And it wasn't like that. I did so many things in that relationship that I'm ashamed of. I lied and stole and cheated, and I was cruel, and most of all I'm ashamed of how I used him, of how, over those ten years, I went back time and time again, always for the same reason. He said to me once I don't think you really want to have sex with me, you're just trading sex for intimacy. And I thought No, I'm trading sex for drugs and intimacy.
I'm familiar with that card. For me, it's my widowhood - ten years old this year. "My first husband died. He killed himself." It's a statement that absolves me of all responsibility. I'm not at all responsible. And yet, of course, I am.
Another point of similarity is that we're both under-reactors:
The fertility doctor had been asking me if I'd been feeling any side-effects from the hormones, any breast tenderness, night sweats, strange emotions, and I'd been happy to report I hadn't felt a thing. Now I was coming to realise that was a bad thing, my body's stoic insensibility. I was under-reacting, just like I always did.
Some of this is having thick natural buffers, a capacity to keep your head while others, etc. Part of it (for myself) is what I think of as burnt-off emotional nerve-endings, meaning I spend a lot of time observing my emotions rather than feeling them. There's a bit of Scottish parsimoniousness (even though emotions are free), of it not being worth the effort, and some distaste for making a fuss, being a mess. At 12 or 14 I can remember trying to get a good crying jag up over some teenage injustice, standing in front of the mirror to watch myself sob, and giving up because I just wasn't that into it. Two men have left me (one to suicide, one to another woman), because, they said, in their different ways, I know you'll cope. Which is another way of saying I know you won't make this hard for me.
Kate writes about going to a doctor for abdominal pain, and being told there's a chance she has ovarian cancer:
At some point he said that I was very calm, and I remember thinking, I don't really see what the alternative is, were there patients who would burst into tears or shriek No no no or say well that's just fucking brilliant isn't it. I said something like Well there's not much point getting upset at this stage. I had a therapist at this time - she was a Scandinavian of some kind - and I remember her saying to me once, in her northern European accent, I find it interesting that you say there is 'no point' in feeling a certain way. Do you believe that emotions should serve a utilitarian purpose? It was the kind of annoying question you pay good money for.
Many many years ago I watched a tv series called something like Child of Our Times. It was probably a turn of the millennium thing. In it, a jovial child development expert tracked the progress of a group of kids all born at the same time.
One episode has never left me. The kids would've been about four. They were testing the kids' ability to recognise and describe emotions. They set up a test where the kids listened to a taped recording of a voice actor reading recipes, in Italian, with exaggerated emotion in her voice: great sadness, great happiness, great fear. The kids were given printed sheets of cartoon faces to hold up, matching the smiley or crying face to the emotion in the recording.
The kids by and large did fairly well, but one child - a little blonde girl - failed spectacularly. She kept holding up the smiley face whenever the voice actor's rendition ached with sadness. And this was odd because this kid was preternaturally attuned, an old soul. Her family was under some form of stress (perhaps the parents were on the fringe of breaking up?) and she shuttled around, settling things down. So the jovial child development expert delved in, and asked her about the face/voice mis-match. And she said It's important people think you're happy, even when you're sad. The tenderness, sadness and self-recognition I felt in that moment still haunt me.
Kate writes:
I have always observed but am still surprised by the fact that, when you pretend to be OK, most people think you are. You're expecting at least some of them to see through you, but they almost never do.
I have a recurring dream that I am being held hostage, or in some dangerous situation, some threatening men are there who I know mean me harm, Whatever the situation, I know instinctively that the only way to survive is to pretend I don't know they are a threat. I need to behave as if everything is fine, while calculating my escape. In one version of the dream, I am lying in bed with an intruder next to me, crouched by my face; I pretend I think he's a family member and tell him, groggily, that I'm asleep. In another I'm being held in a compound, but I walk around with my captors, politely commenting on the landscaping, while secretly looking for a way out. The dreams never resolve one way or another, but the sense on waking is of the enormous pressure of knowing your safety depends on cheerfulness, on your ability to convince others that you are blithely unaware of danger. I know my sister has the same dream sometimes.
In her acknowledgements, Kate talks about her dad's reaction to the book. Her dad loves her: both her parents do, and she them, and the largely untroubled nature of that loving is one of the things that balance out the horror movie bits. But he's upset that the book focuses on all the bruises on the apple of Kate's life, and doesn't reflect its shine: her happy marriage, her successful career, her publishing record, her literary fame, her solidity in the world. Why is she painting herself in such an unflattering light?
There's a passage in the book that sums up for me the wisdom of Kate Camp. In her interview with Kim Hill, Kate passingly references a "not very startling self-realisation of the Covid era", and this is one of these. It's not a unique realisation but you just know she has lived in, in a thousand humdrum moments that may well make her wince to recall, but that are irresistible because when she writes them down, they make a hell of a good story:
When you think about rock bottom, it sounds like a one-time thing, but in my experience it's a place you end up going to over and over. If you're lucky, you learn something each time you visit.
August 6, 2022
I picked this up with anticipation, its interesting when you know the writer and many of the times she is writng about.
Not for the faint hearted, these essays draw us all back into the decades we grew up in, into Kate's life, her insecurities, her darkest memories and amongst them tthe ender moments and vunerabilities, warts and all. Brave, funny, honest, and wrtten in Kate's immitable styke, I never tire of reading her work, or hearing her take on life. As a friend, mentor, colleague, fun companion, but most of all writer she is without peer.
We need honest memory, to tease out our thoughts and dreams, to show what was and can be.
Not for the faint hearted, these essays draw us all back into the decades we grew up in, into Kate's life, her insecurities, her darkest memories and amongst them tthe ender moments and vunerabilities, warts and all. Brave, funny, honest, and wrtten in Kate's immitable styke, I never tire of reading her work, or hearing her take on life. As a friend, mentor, colleague, fun companion, but most of all writer she is without peer.
We need honest memory, to tease out our thoughts and dreams, to show what was and can be.
August 6, 2022
Kate has a poetic style of writing that vividly brings her stories to life, told with an honesty that is rare. Doesn’t shy from the details, many which I imagine were challenging to write. Loved it.
June 29, 2023
I absolutely live for memoir essays and this is the genre perfected. So much of the pleasure is the familiarity - she's slightly older but grew up in the same city as me, and the memories she dug up! But it's more than that, everything is beautifully descriptive, and the stories are funny and tragic and heart-rending. I've noticed I do this thing when I'm enjoying a memoir; I constantly look at the author photo. I think I need to see who this is happening to, can you see it in their face now. I probably looked at her picture about every other page ha ha. And this is yet another book on the pile of local ladies writing outstanding memoir. Five stars.
October 31, 2022
Although my childhood was the nineties and teens in the noughties, I had so many nostalgia moments when reading this book.
I forgot how my mother would use a jug to wash my hair and Port Royals cigarettes. I wish there was a bit more about Kate's experience with IVF as the media and buzz around the book very much pushed this as its main selling point. However I feel this book was about life and growing with Kate and I finished this book in a day. I wished it was never ending and there was a follow up book about Kate's adventures in the nineties with all the clubs and haunts of Wellington at the time.
I forgot how my mother would use a jug to wash my hair and Port Royals cigarettes. I wish there was a bit more about Kate's experience with IVF as the media and buzz around the book very much pushed this as its main selling point. However I feel this book was about life and growing with Kate and I finished this book in a day. I wished it was never ending and there was a follow up book about Kate's adventures in the nineties with all the clubs and haunts of Wellington at the time.
October 31, 2022
Loved this book.
July 28, 2023
Bravo Kate Camp!
My never fail book buddy bought this wonderful courageous book to my attention and I’m so very grateful. In a way I do think this book was about me. Kate’s incredible writing bought great swathes of my early life flooding back in. The sense of cold, lonely, uncertain risky times along with beautiful nostalgic moments that were magic.
More than that though she has got me thinking about what I’ve come to feel deeply is that the years we were in our formative selves women essentially experienced a collective neglect. By our formative I mean the generation of women born as early Gen Xers (1965-70) the likes of Uma Thurman, Sinead O’Connor, Bjork, Renee Zellwinger, Gwen Steffani etc. We were the girls who were told we could do anything yet we were still marinating in the domination of an entrenched patriarchal hierarchy.
Here in New Zealand as Kate demonstrates rape culture and reliance on male acceptance meant the idea of authenticity and independence was taken away from us. Kate has got hers back and thanks to her I’m going to as well.
This isn’t for the faint hearted amongst us or the nothing to see here crowd but boy howdy it struck the perfect chord for me at just the right time.
Tremendous.
My never fail book buddy bought this wonderful courageous book to my attention and I’m so very grateful. In a way I do think this book was about me. Kate’s incredible writing bought great swathes of my early life flooding back in. The sense of cold, lonely, uncertain risky times along with beautiful nostalgic moments that were magic.
More than that though she has got me thinking about what I’ve come to feel deeply is that the years we were in our formative selves women essentially experienced a collective neglect. By our formative I mean the generation of women born as early Gen Xers (1965-70) the likes of Uma Thurman, Sinead O’Connor, Bjork, Renee Zellwinger, Gwen Steffani etc. We were the girls who were told we could do anything yet we were still marinating in the domination of an entrenched patriarchal hierarchy.
Here in New Zealand as Kate demonstrates rape culture and reliance on male acceptance meant the idea of authenticity and independence was taken away from us. Kate has got hers back and thanks to her I’m going to as well.
This isn’t for the faint hearted amongst us or the nothing to see here crowd but boy howdy it struck the perfect chord for me at just the right time.
Tremendous.
August 27, 2022
This was a delightful read. Honest, funny and well written. Would have loved to see some photos to illustrate the stories.
August 29, 2022
Camp has lived harder than I expected from her poetry and that authoritative voice talking books on the radio. An excellent memoir that's so often sharply insightful, it's frustrating when the writing occasionally labours under the weight of a few too many words. In my humble opinion. Mostly, she lives up to her own maxim of writing "the truest thing you can". I really loved the piece about smoking, probably the best thing I've read about it because it takes in all the social and mental support smoking used to give you before it became purely antisocial and only worth speaking about in terms of health cost and addiction.
December 8, 2022
I don't know how to rate this one - she writes herself in such a manner that you don't like her. But, it's well written and lyrical. She's had a somewhat wild life at times. Probably a book I'll think about for a while after!
October 7, 2022
Easy to read - some parts very funny, some very sad and painful, and some odd very personal stuff. I suppose it's the poet's eye.
December 16, 2022
Loved the nostalgic musings and great to hear an authentic NZ voice. Quite interesting situations she has had!
January 16, 2023
Definitely worth reading. Flashes of brilliant insight. Wellingtonians will recognize places and I like that.
August 30, 2023
Laugh out loud funny. And gutsy: who admits to wetting their pants as an adult, and devotes a whole chapter to it in a book? Not many, that's for sure.
April 11, 2023
Kate Camp's writing is evocative and descriptive, and she summons up well various episodes from her childhood and adolescence. However, I felt overall the text lacked a strong emotional arc: even when it delved into difficult and distressing material, it fell a bit flat as a whole.
October 30, 2024
Now, this is how you write a memoir. Extreme detail, remembered perfectly. I don't know how Kate Camp remembers things so well - I know I don't - but at one point she says of her childhood holiday home: "Still, I can go into the memory bach anytime, and recover items that are no longer there, that I haven't seen in decades." She then proceeds to describe in intricate detail to the point you can see the scene in your mind's eye: "In those days the TV at Waikanae sits up high, by the roof, on top of the cabinet that holds Mum and Dad's clothes and that their bed slides under during the day. And the TV has its own curtain that you draw across in front of it, so burglars can't see it I guess. It's a black-and-white curtain with blobby patterns-I recognise them now as Marimekko style."
Apart from a couple of wonderful descriptions of the houses the author knew as a child and the fond memories of her childhood activities, there are stories of her inarguably wild teenagerhood, of cigarettes, drugs and alcohol, and struggles with relationships and crime. This memoir is a carefully curated selection of tales of a person who has dabbled with the illicit, the unwise, but ended up a poet and writer.
It's wonderful to see life through Kate Camp's eyes, and explore the 70s, 80s and 90s again. It's especially fun as it's set in Wellington - at one point she describes going to one of my favourite local cafes and often I can picture a scene she describes. A nostalgic, at times traumatic, but always entertaining read.
Apart from a couple of wonderful descriptions of the houses the author knew as a child and the fond memories of her childhood activities, there are stories of her inarguably wild teenagerhood, of cigarettes, drugs and alcohol, and struggles with relationships and crime. This memoir is a carefully curated selection of tales of a person who has dabbled with the illicit, the unwise, but ended up a poet and writer.
It's wonderful to see life through Kate Camp's eyes, and explore the 70s, 80s and 90s again. It's especially fun as it's set in Wellington - at one point she describes going to one of my favourite local cafes and often I can picture a scene she describes. A nostalgic, at times traumatic, but always entertaining read.
February 25, 2024
As another 1972 born Kate who also grew up and lives in Wellington I may be biased! For me the power of this memoir wasn’t in the incredible detail Kate remembers things, but how she takes you to the place of some fraught and horrendous life experiences.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews