Money for Something

Mia is nineteen, too mentally ill and too often on drugs to keep a 'straight' job so she starts working at a massage parlour. She takes to sex work with recklessness, aplomb, and good humour.

As she works her way through Sydney's many rub-and-tug joints, Mia, or Sasha as she is now known, meets women from every walk of life who choose sex work for myriad reasons.

While negotiating the demands of her new job, she battles her problematic drug use, and the mental illness that has shaped her life. Rather than needing saving from sex work, it is the work that saves her from her many demons.

This is a unique memoir that is shameless, painfully honest and with an ending that refuses to wrap up in a tidy bow. Rejecting the redemption narrative normally associated with sex work, this is an exploration of how it gave the author the stability she needed to save herself from drugs and mental illness. This alone sets it apart from other sex work memoirs, but it is the author's burning prose that is the real standout, shedding new light on mania, drug addiction and the benefits and pitfalls of sex work.