Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary by Kate Camp

Kate Camp’s teenage diary, written when she was aged 13 to 14, offers more than expected. It’s also a social history, a study of a family unravelling, and an exploration of the transition from early adolescence to early adulthood for a young woman who “pushed the limits further and further”, struggled with addiction, and saw her life begin to fall apart.

As an adult, Camp found her diary in a box marked ‘Sentimental Papers’ and she’s safeguarded it ever since. 1986 was the only year she’s kept a diary, and she scrawled in it daily with “astonishing consistency”. The diary, she suggests, is both a very sad document and an origin story that deserves retrospective analysis.

Camp had read extracts from her diary several times during the Bad Diaries Salons at Verb Wellington’s annual literary festival.

People were laughing so loudly I had to keep pausing for the roar to die down. When I got to a serious or shocking detail, the quiet was profound, and when a page revealed some alarming fact, there were audible gasps.

These Salon experiences spurred Camp to read and respond to the diary herself. Throughout 2024 she re-read each entry and wrote notes that captured her immediate reaction to the content. Leather and Chains includes both the original verbatim text from the diary – complete with spelling mistakes and creative use of grammar – as well as Camp’s present-day analysis.

After an introduction, the book opens with a scanned handwritten entry covering January 1 and 2. The same content is presented in large type on the next page, followed by Camp’s reaction to it. The rest of the book follows the same layout, although almost all the diary entries are presented in typed form rather than Camp’s original looping handwriting. Are the diary entries reproduced in a prominent typeface because readers are anticipated to be middle-aged people who may have difficulty reading smaller print? Or perhaps it’s to make the entries appear extra shouty, reflecting the intensity of their teenage writer.

Camp’s diary recreates the world of landline phones (“when you called a house, not a person”), cafés with ashtrays alongside teapots, videotapes, and school incinerators. Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 was on the radio, and a packet of cigarettes cost $1.79. In that pre-emoji era, exclamation marks and other symbols did double duty to convey intensity, emphasis and tone; the diary is peppered with them. The diary had no images, although a couple of photos of a young Camp are included in the book. The glossy red ribbon bookmark is a nod to the red faux-leather cover of Camp’s 1986 diary and the same colour as the landline phone on the front cover of Leather and Chains.

Camp had a vibrant social life, with few parental boundaries. Although she was a high-school student – on days when she wasn’t wagging school or forging notes to get out of PE – school often took a back seat to parties and other social events.

PARTY WAS EXCELLENT. Talk about every walk of life!! Great sounds & great grog & great dudes. Didn’t get back to Tanyas till 2.45am. [Diary entry: August 2, 1986]

With no mobile phones or social media, effort and patience were required to stay connected with friends.

No phones, of course; no way of knowing where the other was. Our lives contained so much boredom, so much waiting, uncertainty and surprise.

In 1986, Camp’s parents separated. A recurrent theme emerges: Camp’s once-safe world becomes increasingly chaotic and unpredictable.

A sense, a realisation, that things, that people, can fall apart.

Central to the diary is Camp’s relationship with her significantly older “arrogant and opinionated, overtly sexist, racist and offensive” moody university student “non-boyfriend”, who was also in a relationship with her best friend.

Had very disgruntled conversation with Cameron who doesn’t want “2 14 year-olds telling him what to do!!” HUH!!! I don’t want 1 two faced twenty year old telling me what to do!!!!  [Diary entry: July 17, 1986]

Camp’s astounded that her otherwise caring and smart parents condoned and enabled the relationship. She wonders if – at the time – she knew that it was illegal for her and Cameron to be in a sexual relationship, given that she was under the age of consent.

Looking back … I’ve always seen him as morally culpable, certainly as a bad person, a “user” who took advantage of my emotional neediness, a selfish jerk who strung me along just for sex.

Conversely, she says that she has never considered that their relationship was sexually abusive, or regretted it, or seen herself as a victim. Yet her deep ambivalence about the relationship is evident throughout the book in the words of both her younger and her older selves. She reflects that perhaps she remains in “a longstanding state of denial”. I wonder if there’s a connection between Camp’s teenage experiences and the recurring dream recounted in her 2022 memoir of being held hostage, or in a dangerous situation, by threatening men “who I know mean me harm”.

Some people in the book are mentioned by first and last name, but not Cameron, who (if he’s still alive) would now be a middle-aged man in his sixties. Perhaps he should be thankful that with such a common name his identity remains concealed.

Camp describes how prevailing social narratives in New Zealand during the mid‑1980s influenced her attitudes and behaviour.

At the time, we didn’t have a framework for thinking of sexual desire as a thing that we had ourselves, as teenage girls. Sexual contact was something boys wanted and girls resisted and then gave in to.

I so often refer to needing [Cameron] physically, and I really don’t know how much I do want him physically, how much is posturing for the page, and how much is trading sex for intimacy … my early sexuality is emerging in this environment of deep insecurity, secrecy and ignorance, masked by an ostentatious but totally unearned worldliness.

The cover copy frames the book as a follow-up to Camp’s memoir. Reading both books offers a more nuanced overview of Camp’s life. In particular, there is a stark contrast in her changing outlook towards pregnancy and the possibility of parenthood. The teenage diary entries repeatedly show her fear of being pregnant. Yet in her memoir she writes at length about her attempts to “make a baby”, the rounds of IVF, the hope that eventually becomes a burden, her bitterness and her gradual, reluctant acceptance of infertility. In Leather and Chains she mentions the name she had chosen for the daughter who would never be born.

The book sparks many questions, both conceptual and pragmatic. With irregular paid work and the occasional babysitting job, how did Camp afford so many outings, films, restaurant dinners and takeaways, coffees, cigarettes and alcohol? This is partly explained by her descriptions of eating the cheapest dish on the menu at the Shanghai, stealing from her mother’s purse and her father’s wallet, and nicking ciggies from her father’s not-so-secret supply kept on top of the fridge. Even so, Camp (and her friends) still appear to have had a lot of disposable income.

By the midpoint of the book, I felt I had taken in much of what it had to offer, as many entries cover similar topics. Even so, I continued reading. Many of the most thought-provoking analyses are in the final section of the book. These include Camp’s thoughts on her parents’ hands-off approach to parenting, the stylistic similarities between her teenage prose and her eventual voice as an adult writer, and her role as an unreliable narrator.

How haphazard, vague and insubstantial our memories are …  there are scenes and times of so much significance, of so much feeling, of drama, shock, joy, despair – of which I remember nothing … most of my life, I would say 99 per cent of it, is a total blank – or if not a blank, then just a field of vague impressions … I have almost no recollection at all of any of the incidents in The Diary ... I come to it from the outside, peering into a life that, while I know has been lived by me, is mostly novel and unknown.

Maybe it’s like finding an old photo that includes people you no longer recognise – or a photo taken in a place you don’t remember being – although you look as though you were having a good time. As Arundhati Roy suggests in her 2025 memoir,  “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination”.

Some material at the end of Leather and Chains would have been better placed much earlier, particularly the explanation for the recurrent references to “leather and chains”. Similarly, it would have been helpful to have more of what Camp calls “linguistic side notes” in the introduction, so that readers aren’t left to guess what terms such as “Rons” and “cacking” mean when they first appear.

Camp shares further insights about the book, and her experience writing it, in a 2026 RNZ interview. In the interview, she acknowledges the discomfort of invading her own privacy as well as the privacy of others, and affirms her feelings of compassion towards her younger self.

Leather & Chains concludes with Camp’s observation that being able to run wild as a young teen was not such a good thing after all. There were long-term negative consequences for both Camp and her sister. Despite this, Camp is fond of the various versions of herself, and grateful for her career as a writer, which has given her “that luxury and blessing that so many people wish for – a sense of the purpose and meaning of my life”.

Reviewer: Anne Kerslake Hendricks 

Te Herenga Waka University Press