“Do you want to know the weird thing? My book essentially set me free. It’s filled with all these dark secrets and thoughts I have been carrying around for 10 years,” says Rita Therese with a sigh of relief. “The book went out in the post and I was finally done. That chapter of my life was now closed, and I got to move on.” The book she’s talking about is Come, an unbelievably raw memoir of her time as a sex worker, dealing with trauma and juggling two personas.
The writer’s voice is bright and bubbly as she recounts stories from her time in a brothel in remote Western Australia and on the set of an escort photo shoot. However, it’s clear her energy hasn’t always been this way. Her tone becomes sombre when she touches on the dark periods of her life: surviving emotional and sexual trauma and coming to terms with her substance abuse issues. It was writing her book that pulled her through. She describes it as a form of “cheap therapy”, a space where she could talk freely without speaking to someone directly about the horrors she was exposed to. “I want to reach out to those who feel alone, or those who have experienced similar trauma and are lost in it. If one person reads Come and finds comfort in the fact they are not alone in their experiences, that’s enough for me,” says Therese, 26.
As she moves onto the next chapter of her life (studying law), Therese is open to the idea of a TV series or movie based on her book, but “only if I can pick all the music and my character. I can’t stand the thought of seeing myself as some fresh 18-year-old, straight out of drama school pretending to give a blow job!”
This article originally appeared in the July issue of marie claire – out now.
