MONEY FOR SOMETHING: TUGGING AT YOUR G STRINGS

Money for something and the tricks are not free, Mia Walsch’s memoir MONEY FOR SOMETHING is a rough and tumble in the rub and tug world of erotic massage.

When Mia is arsed from her insurance company filing clerk job for being a slack arse, the on her arse bong bingeing nineteen year old finally follows her destiny.

As a student, Mia covered her school folders and diaries with the adult services pages from the newspaper. She didn’t know then that she would later spend three years working her way through a good number of those establishments.

As Mia says in haunting refrain, she has no shame, only need. Money for Something is an exploration and examination of the necessity and urgency of need; need as hunger, need as yearning, the need for drugs, the need to self-harm, the need for sex, attention, self-destruction, escape.

Money for Something is certainly an account of an alternative lifestyle, an offer to experience a way of life vicariously through a divergent perspective, and the daily task of striking a balance between joy and depression, between pleasure and pain.

Mia muses on the stigma of working on staff. If sex work is the selling of a body, cant the same be said about other forms of bodily labour. Any sort of physical work for compensation could be classified as ‘selling a body.’

Proclaiming she is happy giving handies, sitting on faces and the occasional blow job, Mia shafts the idea of full service, penetrative sex.

Fetish fun is another facet Mia explores, apprenticing at The Manor, a dungeon for doms to work on subs where she trained in sessions how to spank, paddle, flog, tie, cuff, role-play, penetrate and flagellate.

Mia dispenses some literary advice. Don’t read Flaubert in the bath, especially with a fag dropping fleabag scaredy cat. Madame Bovary nearly killed her, but for real. Good old Gustave left her literally gasping.

There’s few that can hold a candle to her candour, as she waxes and never wanes, weighing in on “taboo” subjects —mental illness, drug use, self-harm, sexuality and sex—and makes them totems.

MONEY FOR SOMETHING by Mia Walsch is published by Echo