The sudden death of her husband nearly destroyed Crazy Grief podcaster Tatiana Hotere. Her darkly comic survival story, Skin Hunger, was a hit at the Auckland Fringe Festival last September, when this article was originally published. Now it’s back for a return season, at Auckland’s Q Theatre. As told to Joanna Wane.
Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. They love you, but with every dish you're fed comes a hot, steaming glass of guilt. So the play is a lot about my struggle with shame, and that intersection between grief, religion and sexuality.
Each element I chose for the [publicity] poster was very intentional. When you see mascara running down a woman's face, you know she's been crying. That's my grief. I'm naked – although I don't really show anything – and I'm wearing a halo, because there's this whole thing about women being Madonna or a shameless whore. Rosary beads, of course.
I’m holding an apple, that sensual, forbidden thing; a glass of wine, and a pink vibrator, the first one I ever bought, after Jason died. Don’t buy it, though. There are better ones.
I'm from Brazil, where I was raised by my grandparents. My grandmother, who was Italian, was Roman Catholic and very staunch. I've always had this sense of awe at the beauty in the world and felt there must be God; there has to be something bigger than us. But religion is so divorced from the female presence. A "good" woman does not have one sexual bone in her body.
