You Probably Think This Song Is About You

Description

Title: You Probably Think This Song Is About You
Author: Kate Camp
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, 2022
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good

Description:

“Never apologise, never explain,” Kate Camp’s mother used to say. Camp has made this a policy. Whether she is visiting her boyfriend in prison, canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace, standing in a corporate toilet with sodden underwear, or sitting across from a doctor at an IVF clinic, she does not explain herself. She writes it down instead.

You Probably Think This Song Is About You is a memoir in essays — short, precise, poet’s-eye pieces that move back and forth through the smoke-filled rooms of Camp’s life: a nostalgic childhood in 1970s and 80s New Zealand, the boozy pothead years of the 90s, and the sobering reality of a world in which Hillary Clinton did not win. The subjects are: bad relationships, smoking, misheard songs, the fallibility of memory, Louise Hay’s self-help phenomenon, wrong turns taken, and the particular texture of growing up female in New Zealand in a specific era that most of her readers will remember from the inside.

The essays do not follow a linear arc. They accumulate. By the end, the portrait is whole, and the wisdom is genuinely hard-won rather than performed.

Catherine Chidgey endorsed it: “Her essays shine with wit, intelligence, and a humanity that is both intimate and universal. An unmissable read.” The Spinoff called it “brilliant and brave.” Newsroom named it Book of the Week.

Kate Camp has published eight collections of poetry over 27 years and won the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, and the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book. She is a familiar voice on Radio New Zealand as a book reviewer. This is the book she wrote when she turned her poet’s eye on her own life.

This copy is secondhand. The book is currently in print at $35.00 new.

Why We Stock It:

A NZ poet who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, writing honestly about what it was like — the cigarettes, the cassette tapes, the wrong men, the things you tried to fix with self-help books at 3am. The Gravy’s audience will recognise this world. You probably think this song is about you too.