Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary

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 on her 1986 diary.

Reading The Diary in its entirety for the first time, she revels in 80s touchstones like Revlon Custom Eyes and 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. 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.’

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

'Kate Camp reads the words of grownupchild Kate of 1986 – achingly funny, arch and louche, often shocking, always clever. And all of it threaded through with such pain and sadness and unsettling darkness, such yearning to be loved. I thought I knew The Diary so well, after all these years listening and watching from the wings. But reading The Diary myself, as she does in this remarkable project, is richer, funnier and, yes, sadder than experiencing it live in eight-minute snippets. I’ve often wondered about Kate Camp: how did she get to be so fearless, so peerless, so bold? The answer is in these pages.’ —Tracy Farr, author of Wonderland and convenor of the Bad Diaries Salon

‘An irresistible blend of darkness and light.’—Catherine Chidgey, author of The Book of Guilt and Pet

‘IF YOU EVER GET TO SEE KATE CAMP READ FROM HER 14YO DIARY DO IT FUCKING DO IT.’ —Melody Thomas, host of The Good Sex Project

Kate Camp is the author of the memoir You Probably Think This Song Is About You (2022) and eight acclaimed collections of poems, including The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (winner of the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry in 2011), How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), and Makeshift Seasons (2025). Kate was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington.

Cover: Todd Atticus