She’s gone by Chelsea, Stephanie, Apple, Sabrina and Verona, but it’s Bella Green that we get to know in ‘Happy Endings’ as our author reconciles the trauma, mental health challenges, mind altering substances, dissociative states, warm friendships, travel, education and talent that has lead her to where she is today. Hailing from Perth this Melburnian is a writer, comedian and sex worker with many regulars who know the full picture of who she is, and love it.
Green has been lying down, and in other positions, for so long we should definitely call it a career.
The book is full of the usual anecdotes you’d expect from a workplace such as colleagues you can’t stand, clients you’d rather not see again and gratifying return business, work trips or as she calls it ‘going on tour’, the stress of being a contractor, purposefully time-wasting on the job, dealing with a crew of woke Gen-Z new hires, and up-skilling (you’ll have to buy the book to find out how).
And then, there are the things we don’t usually find in the office, such as being told you can spend 24hours at work, your health and sanity compromised and worrying about how your social, love and work lives might overlap.
The memoir is explicit and laugh out loud funny at times, but there is a painful subplot which perhaps accounts for the trajectory of her story.
Green was not protected as a child and someone hurt her. She also lived with an undiagnosed mental health condition for many years before (while keeping her taboo day job) she paid her own way through a paramedicine course and realised what was up.
These ideas, of trauma and self-soothing or disassociating, loop back at the ‘happy ending’ of the title where Green talks about finally seeing herself as enough and being proud to be a triple-threat ‘comedian, writer, professional lover’.
As she concludes ‘the unrelenting drive to be the best imitation of myself was the very thing holding me back. I don’t need to fit in with other people to have a home – my home is the people who love me in all of my imperfect glory.’
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