Nothing but My Body

by Tilly Lawless

A thought-provoking, discomforting and beautiful novel about love, obsession, community and friendship.

Nothing But My Body is an eight day journey through a young woman's mind, a queer sex worker in Australia, as she navigates through break ups and infatuation across a year.

Set during the bushfire season of 2019 and into the coronavirus pandemic, sex work is the constant backdrop of the story as it moves between Sydney, Berlin, Orange and Bellingen. Exploring the interplay between your external and internal world, the fluctuations of mental health and the way in which emotions shape the pace of your thoughts, ultimately it is a rejection of romantic love, celebration of queer community and a reckoning with the body as both abject and joyous.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Queer, LGBT, Audiobook, Sex Work, Australia

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2021

About the author

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker who utilises her online platform to speak about her personal experiences within the sex industry, in an attempt to shine a light on the every day stigma that sex workers come up against. Growing up in rural NSW, her writing is often a bucolic love letter to the countryside that she comes from, and also a deeply intimate insight into queer romance and relationships. You can read her writing in various publications, but it's best going straight to the source and reading it directly from her Instagram, @tilly_lawless.

Reviews

[Hag · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished my epiphany and my trans friend said yass. I voiced my realisation and my gay friend gave me a bump. I finished my bump and a group of queer babes gave me a meaningful hi-five.

[Jules · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was very close to a DNF for me, but it’s a quick read and I pushed through. Tilly’s signature naval gazing and run on sentences are pithy in the form of an Instagram caption but quickly become dull in a novel. If you follow Tilly you’ll have heard it all before anyway, often verbatim - though this added a very meta experience to my reading. I remember watching Tilly’s gacked Insta stories about casually fucking a DJ in Berlin and having people ascribe social capital to this, and this plays out almost word for word in the book.

I’m always drawn to books written by sex workers, which are usually memoirs. I think people are fascinated by anyone who works with the extremes of people, which is also why medical memoirs are so popular. Lawless has published Nothing But My Body as autofiction which interested me, but it seems like a legal loophole to me. The book is divided into 8 sections, ostensibly 8 days in the life of a queer sex worker. I’m not sure how successful this structure, or genre, was. Each section feels very distinct to the others, more like essays than chapters. I think you would appreciate this book more if you haven’t followed Lawless on Instagram for several years.

[John Gilbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was interesting, but not an easy read. Written by an intelligent sex worker about her life as a working girl. Mostly based in Sydney, some interesting situations and clients, her descriptions of such are often most interesting. Not an erotic scene in the narrative, after all this is her work. Sometimes hard to read, sometimes sad, some pathetic clients, but in the end educational for me. Not for everyone.

[Sheree | Keeping Up With The Penguins · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing But My Body steers hard into the skid of stream-of-consciousness; reading it is like listening to a friend who has been waiting for you in a bar and disgorges as soon as you’ve arrived. It might be a bit confronting for some people who aren’t familiar with sex work (and that’s possibly the “point”), but that didn’t bother me. The thing is, I found it a bit too performative and self-involved to really resonate.

My full review of Nothing But My Body is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

[ro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Love Tilly’s work but the way she writes about race and politics in this is infuriating

[Lara · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very easy read, the stream of consciousness and Tillys style makes it so.
The weird identity naming feels very uncomfortable throughout the book - Tilly refers to her friends by identity markers and yet her friends seem to be a backdrop for her life, not characters at all beyond their identities. We hear about people's transness or ethnicities, but never who they are, which makes these labels feel like political dressings to signify the diversity of Tillys friendship group.
I felt that Tilly didn't leave enough space for the audience to exist, we were privy to every single one of her thoughts and anxieties and told exactly HOW to think about these anxieties. Whilst the book definitely gave me the impression of a very anxious individual, I couldn't relate to her because there was no space for me to think about my own anxiety unless it looked identical to hers.
Finally, I felt that the main character didn't really develop, learn anything or change at all. She felt like the same person at the end of the novel to who she was at the beginning. We didn't really get any flaws revealed (she was constantly the one with the political knowledge amongst her friends often monologuing over several pages whilst her friends agreed in two lines) beyond the finitely layed out obsessions around her love life and friendships. And yet these obsessions didn't really shift that much either. They were versions of the same ruminations that were at the start of the book.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

the sydney queer party scenes and stream-of-consciousness writing was pretty cool but why does the narrator have to introduce everyone as their race??

not a bad book to read while you're sick with covid and can't concentrate but otherwise am a bit disappointed :/

[Matthew Anderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really didn’t enjoy this book, and very nearly gave up on it. The stream-of-consciousness run on sentences seemed to span entire chapters, with no space given to take a breath. As a reader it was almost intolerable.

The content was interesting, though there were moments where it felt as though Lawless had a tick-box list of all the subgroups of the queer community that needed a mentioned, and then proceeded to jam them all in the one chapter about Mardi Gras. She bounces from a brief interaction with a queer woman in a wheelchair on the dance floor, to a Lebanese lesbian, a Tongan trans girl, to then clarifying preferred pronouns with a stranger before getting up on the platform to dance with them. Everything about the scene felt concocted and disingenuous (not least of all that I usually can’t even hear myself think in a club, let alone hear another person well enough on the dance floor to ascertain if they prefer she/her or they/them). I know that as a queer woman it wouldn’t be Lawless’s intention to have been tokenistic, but with how sloppily this scene was constructed, it’s hard to read it any other way.

There were aspects of this book that I genuinely liked. The insight into the world of sex work in Sydney was fascinating, particularly the specific angst and uncertainty that emerged with the pandemic. The portrayal of female sexuality and desire were excellent. The many nods to familiar aspects of queer Sydney were good fun. But unfortunately none of this was enough to make this read enjoyable.

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

We see so many memoirs by sex workers published but so few sex workers appear in contemporary literary fiction. I can only think of The Mars Room for a recent example. Lawless is well placed to write this from her lived experience and I applaud her choice to write fiction and not memoir. That said, this book is in really interesting dialogue with Bella Green’s memoir Happy Endings. These two queer sex workers both make the point that the most interesting place in a brothel is the girls room where they gather on breaks and between clients (don’t mess with the TV). The passive aggressive signage about food and keeping the area tidy will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an office. It’s this portrait of comraderie, care and cliques that is so memorable and revealing, not the descriptions of what happens in the working rooms (though some of that is pretty revealing and memorable!). Some chapters worked better than others here and the section on climate anxiety felt shoehorned in whereas the chapter on working in a brothel the night before lockdown was confronting and brilliant.

[Claire Gilmour · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was very close to a DNF for me, but it was a quick read and I somehow pushed through.

Quite honestly, I can’t even describe what this was about or what was the moral or lesson from the story. It was simultaneously too much, and not enough.

The book hung onto half a star because I thought the honesty and relevance of the impact of Covid 19 on sex workers was eye opening. 1.5 stars, rounded down.

[Sigourney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was great to learn and understand more about the sex industry. Some of the prose was really beautiful. But it was a little odd how all the narrator’s friends and acquaintances are consistently only referred to by their labels. They weren’t given much depth even though the book is meant to be an ode to friendship…

[Lizzy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I recognise this had some kind of value, but the writing and way it was told made this close to unbearable. If the audiobook wasn't so short I 100% would've dnfed 🥲

[Hayley (hayleys.little.library) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Last week I read 'Nothing but my body' by Tilly Lawless, and I really enjoyed it!! It is very impressive that this is Tilly’s debut novel, and I can't wait to see what she writes in the future. It was a really cool format, with this novel describing eight days in her mind. Tilly is a queer sex worker, and I really enjoyed how raw, honest and vulnerable she was. She also covered some other topics such as her thoughts (and fears) surrounding the Australian bush fires and climate change. It was really refreshing to read and strongly resonate with so many of her thoughts.
'Nothing but my body' is out on the 3rd of August.
Thank you to @allenandunwin for my #gifted copy, it is always appreciated.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rubbish.
My local public library has a habit of getting in any book that is the current hyped and talked about thing. This books is being hyped up as some sort of "le edgy sex worker memoir" or something. it's pretty shallow in reality. The writing is not good and the little tacked in comments about race, sexuality etc just seem like they're put in to make the purple haired crowd nod in approval.
Maybe i'm being a grumpy old man but the whole sex worker memoir thing has been done before and done better. "The Happy Hooker" by Xaveria Hollander was published in the 1970's and "In My Skin" by Kate Holden was published in 2005 or therabouts. Both are superior to this juvenile scribble of a book.
Glad i got it from a library and didn't pay any money for it.

[jamdiet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good writing, form edges against the style though. It feels like a lot of the text originated in her instagram writing and I think I would have enjoyed it more appearing in that format, sliced vignettes accompanied by images. Being turned into a novel without attempting to bridge that gap in presentation weakens some of the strengths of the pieces while accentuating their weaknesses. I was enthralled at points but the vignette form meant by the time I was waist deep I had to get out of the water and move to a new beach.

[Steffi Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved how her prose just went on and on, it made it so easy to read
Such an addictive read as well I found it very hard to put down! I actually finished it a few weeks ago I just forgot to update on here
I also have recommended to most of my friends to read it! Her thought processes are so relatable and understandable

[Kali Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars - I really enjoyed this book to begin with. The first few chapters were so honest and I felt connected to the narrator, but by the end it started to feel like I was just reading rambling paragraphs that weren't really going anywhere.

[Trigger Warning Database]

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Lesbomisia
Domestic abuse
Anxiety & panic attacks
Gambling addiction
Drug addiction discussed
Self harm, specifically cutting
Suicidal ideation
Drug use
Alcohol abuse
Emesis

[Sim ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t think I’d smash through this book in 2 days 😂

This book is not for everyone; it’s explicit, unflinching, raw and intimate with a compulsive but beautiful writing style.

I really enjoyed getting to know such a personal narrative from the narrator as a queer sex worker. I also appreciated the commentary on relationship anarchy, capitalism and sex.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished this book in almost one sitting. Easy to read, with run-on prose which can become exhausting. An interesting exploration of sex work intermingled with questions of climate anxiety, identity, race, gender, friendship, relationships and the pandemic.

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a wild ride.

Divided into eight non-sequential days in the life of an unnamed white, queer sex worker, we follow Maddy (her work name) through the highs and lows of her personal experiences and world events, including the 2019/2020 Australian black summer bushfires as well as the coronavirus pandemic. She muses endlessly on the state of her relationships, friendships, and work.

I've rated this four stars but honestly I don't know how I really feel about it. It feels to be both a four star read and a two star read simultaneously. It's graphic, I've read some smut in my time so it's not like I'm some sort of puritan, but there's only so many times that you really read about sticky dried cum and gagging for a pounding. There's something infantile about the endless raunch, as if somehow proving that woman can be as "sex obsessed" as the male stereotype. But then again maybe the text is saying something about that? But then again I don't feel like that what was the narrative was trying to say? And yet I feel like being bothered by this is some falling into line of the redundant expectations of "polite ladies"? But mostly, it's ridiculous that I'm so conflicted over it.

There's some interesting musings on consent, and addiction but again... it doesn't really feel like it goes anywhere. Our protagonist twirls her hair and says she's fine as long as she stays away from alcohol and uppers while snorting a huge line of ketamine, well she doesn't really twirl her hair. That's just something my mind went to. There's something incredibly immature about it and yet she's only twenty six? Maybe it's the confidence in which she talks about it. There's something... like. Wildly teenage about thinking you know yourself so completely when who the frick frack knows anything at twenty six?

There's some pretentious dribble in the stream of thought prose in which Tilly Lawless chooses to write. Some of thoughts on wider issues of climate change and colonisation are very cringe but then... we're in the mind of a white twenty six year old so maybe it's on brand. The impact of the pandemic on sex workers was well done and insightful. But mostly I think the book thinks it's deeper than it is.

Hmm. Maybe I'll compromise and change it to a three star. It's raw and honest. But maybe too honest. In an age of overshare restraint is sometimes great. Not every thought you have is profound.

[Hamad AlMannai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tilly Lawless is a Sydney-based queer SW and a SW rights advocate on instagram.
Her memoirs where confronting and unapologetic. This book showed me a unique POV of the Sydney queer party scene and into the clandestine world of Sydney brothels and sex work, during the interesting times of the 2020 bushfires and the covid pandemic.
The book is advertised as fiction even though it’s clearly a memoir. It’s written in a stream of consciousness style that is popular with contemporary writers from the East Coast. Overall a very hard book to put down or forget.

[Eve Dangerfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poignant and so fascinating. Also Tilly Lawless and I went to the same pre-covid lockdown Mardi Gras in 2020 (along with millions) and those days will live forever in my treasured memories. I loved reading about another femme experiencing that perfectly, insanely gorgeous time.

[Cesc]

The memoir of a sex worker in Sydney, this book is raw, humorous (I didn’t say funny), and very existential. I was glad to have a window into Lawless’ life and experiences and found it to be quite readable. I’m not sure she is the most talented writer, though, which I will forgive her for.

The audiobook was pretty good, except for the ways she pronounces labia and gasp (for this I will not forgive her).

[charlene ✿ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars  

★★★☆☆

☞ Trigger warnings: *contains spoilers*
animal death, alcoholism, anxiety & anxiety attacks, blood depiction, COVID-19 pandemic, depression, domestic abuse & violence, drug abuse, emotional abuse, gambling addiction, grief & loss depiction, homelessness, intimate partner abuse & violence, pandemics, plagues and contagions, police brutality & violence, poverty, pregnancy, racisim, scars, self-harm, sexism & misogny, sexual assault, sexual harrasment, sex-worker shaming, sex work, slut-shaming, substance addiction, suicide & attempted suicide, suicidal ideation, transmisia.
.

when virgina woolf created / popularised the stream of conciousness writing style i doubt she imagined it being used to describe a night out in Berghaim doing copious amounts of drugs and having drunken stranger sex and philosphising about idol worship and the value we attain through assossiation rather than as a seperate person. hilarious stuff.


saturday
- "My body has been a tool that I've wielded, but it's also something I just live in every day, that I'm comfortable with and no longer itch to record in order to assert my personhood on the world."
- "Sometimes I feel like it's time I'm fighting with, having to endure."


sunday
- "because men can spring anything on you anytime and you'll never be prepared for it all."
- "everyone is so unique in their ddepravity, how could I counter a sudden exposé?"
- "And really he had no respect for me at all and that what scared me most: that clients with no respect for me could treat me in ways I couldn't predict."
- "Respect has a sameness, a conformity to it, but disrespect is varied and alien in it's indiviudal manifisation."
- "as a sex worker my body is especially viewed so: a vehicle for contagion and public health risk, used and abused, devalued and discarded... I want to be fruitful in spite of that, and maybe even because of that."
- "my only fear is that my sins will be vistied on my children, that they will be judged because of the labour of their mother, even as she laboured to bring them into this world with the same copper loins that conquered men."
- "my worth is somehow tied to who I sleep with -- it doesn't come from within."
- "it assumes my value can be changed by associating with someone, not through my own achievements."
- "false idols fail us, and we fail them in the moment we turn them into idol, not a person."


monday
- "forgetting that it's my body that's the drawcard and worksite."
- "my sole is what has direct contact with the world in the earth I tread and my left side is the same as my heart."
- "does he avoid my eyes in case he sees something human in them, is forced to engage with me beyond an orifice to dispel his semen into, realises that I remind him of his daughters or other women in his life? Maaaate. It's not innately disrespectful to me or the women at home if you pay to fuck me."
- "If only we could all voice our want; if only we didn't quantify love according to level of possessiveness."
- "I lose myself in my partner."
- "As women we're raised to take tepid two-steps, to doubt, to let the other make the move."
- "My life reaches beyond this moment and beyond this obsession and beyond this man."

tuesday
- "isn't having children an act of hope"
- "the future feels bleak and I feel powerless to change any of it."
- "You mourn and hope and hope and mourn."
- "The government denies and diverts, and you feel suffocated. You are suffocated. Your house is on fire."
- "It is because we're in the Southern Hemisphere that we can be so easily ignored? (Is this what the people of West Papua, Sudan, Palestine feel constantly - over-looked?)"
- "I know I need more than resilience, I need fortitude, and I know if everyone who is exhausted gives up then we're done for"
- "The audacity, the arrogance, the ego of humans to think we could reap what we liked from the earth with no consequences."
- "We - the general we, the human race, but more specifically the non-Indigenous Australian we - are culpable for what has happened to this continent."
- "where I would no longer be an outsider, and my concept of myself developed around my sexuality because my sexuality was seen as an issue, a topic, coz no one's parents or teachers were gay."
- "...to them we're just a slit between legs incapable of valuable thought or real emotion."
- "I want you to know that you may be able to squint up inside me an dcount the men I hae slept with, like rings in a tree, a tracing of lines that coil up through me till I'm pricked like the tallowwoods beneath which the cows graze, yet none of them have erased where I'm from or who I am."
- "...at what point do you hold someone accountable and at what point do you just forgive coz they were obviously unwell?"
- "The genocide never finished here; colonisation still kills and now it's part of a wider mass extinction."
- "I want the earth to survive us; would trade all of humankind for the earth in a heartbeat. God doesn't barter, though. Does the devil? Please, hear my prayer."

wednesday
- "The danger fit my idea of what sex work must be and I thought what I was doing was illegal so didn't think to wonder if I could work more safely or deserved better treatment."
- "judge me not lest thou be judged."
- "The way I make my living is no better or worse that anyone else in this grimy scramble to survive."
- "...those who were despised and reviled fomred these streets, literarlly."
- "...they haven't murdered us yet. Though we do get murdered...our deaths are less likely to be investigated by authorities because we are seen to be worth less than other respectable woman, expendable: not an innocent victim but a woman who has invited such treatment through the very nature of her work. We're the favoured of serial killers."
- "NHI ('no human involved') being assigned to their victims, an acronym that has beene used by police for those deemed undesirable - black people, homeless people and sex workers among them. And God help you if you're someone who is devalued from birth already and takes on our profession, like a black trans woman sex worker, because society certainly won't!"
- "...did they want to climbe inside me? I wonder. Tuck themselves up behind that same shelf of bone that I strugle to extricate my sponges from? Hollow me out till I'm noting but a domestic chamber to play house with (in)? Do they want to swallow me or be swalled by me?"
- "...there's a huge crossover between working-class queers and sex work, I barely know one who hasn't dabbled in it. The flow between black queer culture, trans culture and sex worker culture is vibrant and otherwise is to pretend that the economic disparities don't exit."

thursday
- "I lied and said I had a boyfriend because clients alwasy respect that more than my own boundaries."
- "My body has alwasy been on the frontline with this, the threat and awareness of illness and violence are occupational hazards."
- "...sex workers are already viewed as carriers of disease, my body already seen as contimated even when healthy."
- "I am simply the brothel poltergeist, a noisy spirit."
- "...how so many people came to know her through her death, but she isn't defined by those awful minutes of terror; her life was years of laughter before that. I think of how every day I go alone into rooms with men who are stronger that me, how vulnerable I am how sometimes I'm scared"
- "If I am killed, will my death usurp my life?"
- "...reminder that everything is transient, and that sometimes the best things in life are fleeting, and that's okay, you'll be okay, as you always are."

thursday
- "In th past, I've been bent over backwards in a sacrafical arc and torn the offal from my toro all to prove (I loved you) and to please. I must learn and unlearn; to give myself without losing myself; to assert myself without fear; not to hinge my love upon the seasaw sway of a power imbalance but to step into the relationship as an equal rather than as a combatant already cowed and apologetic."
- "I want and I'm scared and I feel weak from wanting."

thursday
- "I've been alone in my mind but not alone in life"
- "I want to go into love boldly, like I do everything else. I want to not be incapaciated by it. I want to learn, alwasy. I want to live."





Would I recommend this book??
Yeah, I think so. I think it is a great insight to sex work, and destigmatising it.

Will I re-read this book? 
Maybe. idk hard book to re-read.

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[Eloise Wittkowsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like reading 7 long diary entries. A lot of it made me roll my eyes, but sometimes in a good way.

[Mr Natural · Rating 1 out of 5]

Self-indulgent rubbish. Trying oh-so-hard to be cool & blasé (see the pegging/scat scene), but succeeded only in failing. As Dylan put it, “there’s no success like failure/and failure’s no success at all”. A complete waste of time.

[Sophie Haydon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Felt majorly contrived.

[Stella · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great intimate insight into the thoughts and feelings of someone in the SW industry, but not just about sex work - about love, friendship, growing up in Australia and even the pandemic. I really enjoyed it and found it both interesting and highly relatable, even if my book fell apart during the read.

[Marles Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tilly Lawless a Sydney-based sex worker, writer and rights activist, has delivered a raw, unflinching, honest and open work in "Nothing but my body". Tilly highlights many things that we all probably take for granted, like the need for and the importance of physical touch. And she does this so starkly through Maddy, the character in this book, who as a sex worker, provides this comfort and pleasure to all those who seek it. Equally, the book also vividly explores Maddy's own need for intimacy, pleasure and satisfaction, which I think many would judge a sex worker may have enough of. The book also highlights the highs and lows of queer relationships which can be just as messy as every other relationship.

You get a very deep and visceral view of Maddy and her thoughts, and the impact of relationships, her work and world events. This is so much more than a crossover of life facts and fiction: there is a dichotomy of conflict and value, of what Maddy desires most, and what she needs to do to survive. The book is divided into days of the week, yet spans a year in the life of Maddy, and was written as a train of thought. Everything spills out into each chapter, equally with no rest or disconnection. The flow was like unconscious thought, purposeful ramblings if you will. The destruction and catastrophes experienced in Australia were also a reflection of Maddy's emotional state, as well, as the state of all of us in lockdown and the aftermath of the bushfire and floods in 2020.

Such an introspective book, and razor sharp in addressing being queer, love and relationships, consent, bushfire, drought and pandemics, and the right to work and survive.

Thank you Allen & Unwin for the ARC.