A diary of obsessive love and eating disorders

Book cover of Lesbian Crushes and BulimiaIn 1989 nineteen-year-old Natasha is obsessively in love with her former teacher, Miss Williams. The tattoo she flashes around says so. Natasha meets Alex, a girl her own age, who questions her about the tattoo. An awkward romance is born.

In this real-life teenage diary Natasha records her panic at a looming LESBIAN relationship. To lose some excess fat, she starves herself of food … whilst working in a chip shop. And just to make sure she’s gay, Natasha drags five boys into bed in the space of a week, a sin for which the sexuality police threaten to kick her out of the university Lesbian and Gay Society.

In this coming out story and love story, Natasha struggles with clumsy attempts at heterosexuality, the sickening effects of weight loss techniques, disapproving shaven-headed lesbians, and sexual harassment in the chip shop.

I have just published a new book—a Q&A collaboration with Helena Whitbread, author of The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. Anne was a wealthy lesbian diarist who lived two centuries before our time.

Helena and I investigate Anne’s and my obsession with keeping detailed encoded diaries about every aspects of our lives, including our lesbian sexuality. The book is illustrated with photographs of Anne’s and my diaries. Section headings include:

  • Early sexuality
  • Keeping a diary in the age of technology
  • The mentality behind keeping a detailed diary
  • Encoding
  • Similarities and differences in Anne’s and Natasha’s diaries
  • Obsessiveness
  • How Anne managed her lesbian sexuality
  • Adult sexuality
  • Christianity
  • Helena’s reaction to Anne’s and Natasha’s diaries

PAPERBACK (£4.99)
UK: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1539873366
US: www.amazon.com/dp/1539873366

EBOOK (£1.99)
UK: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01N78B99Q
US: www.amazon.com/dp/B01N78B99Q

“When I first heard that you have been keeping a diary from a young age and, furthermore, that you had used an esoteric code, I was immediately interested. I was further intrigued by the fact that you are a lesbian and wrote about your sexual life. It seemed to me that a modern parallel could be drawn with Anne Lister, the early 19th century lesbian diarist who had written a great deal about her lesbian sexuality in her journals, couched in a secret code of her own devising. I thought it would be interesting to see how far this hypothesis could be taken and wondered if you would be willing to join me in an exploration of the similarities and differences, as diarists and as lesbians, between yourself and a woman who lived some two hundred years before your time.”

Helena Whitbread

Lesbian Crushes in France: A Diary on Screwing Up my Year Abroad (1990-1991) is now available, in both paperback and ebook versions. This is the sequel to Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia.

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In 1990 twenty-year-old Natasha finds herself in France on her university year abroad. She is ANGRY. Everyone should be a lesbian, or she will punish them for their oversight (particularly her bemused fellow English assistant friend, Ange).

The frites and the pâtisseries are not helping Natasha recover from her bulimia. And the door-to-door Mormon missionaries are bedevilling her reluctant search for God.

Natasha does not respond well to the frosty demands of the headmaster of the school where she is teaching.

She passes her time befriending a pair of thieving drop-outs on the run from the law, skinning up grilled banana skins, dodging flashers, and hitch-hiking around Europe.

Lesbian Crushes at School: A Diary on Growing Up Gay in the Eighties (1983-1989) is now available, in both paperback and ebook versions. This is the *prequel* to Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia.

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In 1983 thirteen-year-old Natasha is in love with her French teacher, Miss Williams. When Natasha is cruelly banished from Miss Williams’s class forever, the love develops into obsession … stalking … unhealthy behaviour … and painfully misguided cries for attention.

This uncomfortable yet light-hearted memoir in diary form is primarily a record of obsession.

Natasha is a love-sick lesbian teenager in an all-girls school in the eighties, juggling her Latin homework, Bible study, a crush on Elaine Paige, and her suppressed sexuality. How can she make sense of it all?

But more importantly … tormented by unrequited love … how can Natasha make Miss Williams love her back?

I have just launched my new Lesbian Crush Diaries website. My next two books will be out summer 2014 and winter 2014. Discover what happened BEFORE … and what happened AFTER … www.lesbiancrushdiaries.com

Do you speak French?

The sequel to Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia (1989-1990) will be Lesbian Crushes in France (1990-1991). More dysfunctional behaviour, different country.

Could you give me ANY amount of help correcting the phrases below? They are numbered for easy reference.

Thank you so much,
Natasha x
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To read a preview of my book, use the dark grey arrow on the lighter grey background to the right of the book’s title page below. To enlarge the preview, click on the link just below.

Historian and Editor of 'The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister'

As the editor of the Anne Lister journals I was amazed when I found Natasha Holme’s book. I learned that, like Anne Lister (1791-1840), Natasha has been an obsessive diarist from her early teenage years. But the startling fact is that, again like Anne Lister, Natasha wrote in a secret code of her own devising. This marked her out, to me, as a modern-day Anne Lister. Natasha’s account of her struggle to realise her lesbian sexuality and to deal with her eating disorder makes for an interesting, honest and sometimes painful read. I contacted her and, finding that she has many more years of her diairies yet to be published, I feel that a discerning literary agent might well find it rewarding to take up the challenge of getting them published. Like Anne Lister, from whose diaries I have published two books from which two documentaries and a film have been made, Natasha’s story could, I believe, become the subject of a film. It is my belief that her work on her own life may well make her a ‘name’ in the world of lesbian writing.

Gay people are still struggling to come out, are ridiculed, attacked, and killed for our sexuality. Why is this? It is apparently the word of God that homosexual acts are sinful. Homosexuality is mentioned six times in the Bible. I want to take a look at two aspects of this:
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World Health Day takes place annually on 7th April—each year focusing on a particular aspect of health. The focus for 2012 is Ageing and health: Good health adds life to years. With this in mind, and having just listened to a mother speak of the death of her nineteen year old daughter Melissa from bulimia in 2009 (audio, 12 minutes), I wanted to take a look at the risk of death from bulimia.
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