Kate Camp's new memoir on growing up female

Kate Camp. Photo / Ebony Lamb

The time couldn't be better for women to tell their stories. Just when it seems we aren't being heard – or are willfully ignored – a bounty of powerful, smart, funny, angry, hopeful and unapologetically personal female stories are claiming space on bookshelves globally, demanding attention.

In the past two years we have seen brilliant memoirs and essay collections from local writers Charlotte Grimshaw (The Mirror Book), Patricia Grace (From the Centre), Lana Lopesi (Bloody Woman), Miro Bilbrough (In the Time of the Manaroans), Megan Dunn (Things I Learned at Art School), Caroline Barron (Ripiro Beach), Fiona Kidman (So Far, For Now), Noelle McCarthy (Grand), Sarah Jane Barnett (Notes on Womanhood) and more.

And now, Kate Camp, whose new book You Probably Think This Song Is About You explores the delight and horror of growing up female in the 80s and 90s, full of bravado and resourcefulness yet heartbreakingly vulnerable. Its title appropriately draws on the genius of confessional singer-songwriter Carly Simon, whose biggest hit, You're So Vain, was released in 1972, the year of Camp's birth. "I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee. You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you…"

Camp writes about all of it – how crippling it is to feel unattractive as a young woman; the speed with which girls blame themselves for others' misdeeds; the heady power of newfound freedom; the discomfort and the hilarity of nascent adulthood. But she hesitates over the nature of her book. Is it a collection of essays? Does it qualify as a memoir? Are her stories "big" enough?

"When you talk about a memoir, you think, 'Oh what happened? Is it the memoir of someone who had to cut off their own arm, or is it the memoir of someone who swam under the ice and holds the world record?'" says Camp, who has written the other kind of memoir, which relies on the quality of its voice and point of view, not its epic drama.

"The biggest insecurity I have about the book is why would anyone care? This is just the minutiae of a perfectly ordinary middle-class girl living in the suburbs – like who gives a s***? And the thing I would comfort myself with is, well in 2080 what happened in 1980 will be social history."

Of course, Camp is doing much more than documenting our recent past. She is filtering it through her warm, funny sensibility, distilling the spirit of an average young woman navigating rough waters. Yes, she's sneaking Bacardi and Cokes and reading self-help books but she's also managing a violent, unpredictable boyfriend and a terrible job selling encyclopedias door to door. She is sexually assaulted. She is arrested. Her boyfriend goes to prison. At 15 her confidante is a 41-year-old drug dealer. Time and again she escapes bad situations she isn't equipped to negotiate.

"Being a daring, brave, courageous young woman shouldn't be as dangerous as it is," she says.

Camp, poet, essayist and head of marketing and communications for Te Papa, grew up in Wellington, the younger of two girls in a loving middle-class family. She was always clever and energetic, a boundary-pusher who had more freedom than other kids her age. Her parents divorced when she was about to turn 14 and her boundary pushing intensified. She was the recipient of "50th chances", a point she makes several times in the book, because she knows exactly how lucky she was.

"My parents could have cut me off and not rescued me in those situations where I needed it, but equally if I'd been from a less privileged family those options wouldn't have been open to me," she says. "I was able to get myself out of those holes because of the background I had as the white, wealthy daughter of privilege.

"When I got in trouble for selling drugs at the school gate in the 6th Form, I've got no doubt that if I had been a less privileged person I would have been expelled for that, but as it was my mother marched into the school, put my side and convinced them that they should just let me leave. I got a letter of support from my school, which allowed me to get early entry to university."

Camp continues to be a fortunate person in many respects – she wrote the first half of You Probably Think This Song Is About You while in Menton, France on the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and was able to take four months off work to write the rest. All except the story of her friend Mark's death by suicide, which is a beautiful and funny tribute to a difficult and cherished friend. She wrote that story last, once she had returned to work.

An artist, deeply depressed and habitually ironic, Mark was one of the few people who got to see her early poems, and he proudly told people how talented she was. His funeral, writes Camp, was "very odd", the eulogy a piece of Rowan Atkinson-esque theatre. "Mark was a painter, but in the end he painted himself out of the picture," said the minister. "He was a runner, but he ran away from himself."

Other standout essays concern her mother's home invasion and Camp's 10 years with a violent boyfriend: "Even before we got together, I knew that Jimi wouldn't treat me well." But perhaps the most raw story is that of Camp's infertility struggles and unsuccessful IVF treatment, a story she tried out at last year's Auckland Writers Festival, speaking without notes – just Camp, a Persian rug, a Madonna mic and a roomful of wet-eyed strangers. "It was a bit of a showstopper," she says. She writes of secretly injecting herself with hormones. "You're existing in a constant state of suspended anxiety, which you realise later is called hope. It's your first insight into just how toxic that emotion can be."

Someone gave Camp a diary for Christmas in 1985. For the only time in her life, she faithfully wrote an entry a day for the next year – not about what happened (her parents separated, she had sex for the first time), but about her feelings. It is a treasured artifact, now digitised, and while it barely features in You Probably Think This Song Is About You, it served as a touchstone.

"It enabled me to reconnect with that young woman and think, 'That wasn't a different me, that wasn't someone I now repudiate.' That was someone I can see has a lot of spunk, to use an old-fashioned word, and has a lot of enthusiasm and that enthusiasm might express itself through drawing up crosswords to post to her boyfriend in prison, but it's still the same personality type that I was as a little kid and I am today – full of beans, full of energy, love people, love doing crazy things. It's just that now my crazy things are a lot more healthy and I deploy my courage in more productive ways."

Camp says that diary, so rich in "emotional dra-mah" could be the basis of a whole book. Yes please, thank you.

You Probably Think This Song Is About You, by Kate Camp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35), is out now.