I’m delighted to introduce Lotte Latham and her illustrated memoir Dear Mr Andrews which we’ll be publishing in August 2023.
Dear Mr Andrews is an untidy memoir. It unabashedly details a British woman’s experience of living an everyday routine alongside life as a sex worker from 2016-2022. It’s in the form of angsty missives written from Berlin, Barcelona and London, through lockdown and pretty much back to square one again. This book is what would’ve happened if you’d decided to read your high school crush the entire contents of your secret diary. Then, add a dollop of political nuance to account for the complexities of contemporary sex work in Western culture. xx Julianne, director at Guts
Who are you?
By Lotte Latham
Who am I? Who’s asking?
I’m a thirty-something-year-old child throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks. Is that a facetious answer? Sorry, I suppose I find it a tricky question to answer: Because I write, I have a civilian life, and I partake in sex work. In some places that’s treated like a criminal conviction. For example, despite it being 2022, legislation dictates you can’t be granted a visa to enter the USA, even as a tourist, for being openly involved in prostitution within the last 10 years. That’s the gravity of the stigma I’m up against. So, for me, it’s a pointed question to ask who I am but I’ll give it a go.
I’m Lotte. I’m a Bisexual British Blonde. I’m curvy with natural DD breasts. I like fine wine, classical music, and BDSM <3 <3 <3
What do you do?
“Professional Hedonist” is the description I’ve adopted of late. It does at least encompass every area of my life. My day job is quite frankly camp – I work freelance within a design field adding bells and whistles to stuff so that people want to buy it. I proverbially gild turds for a living. Sex work tops up my accounts when the work runs dry, or supports my art projects and chronic partying. The art is something I’m bashful of; it’s quite an indulgent notion to fuck for art’s sake but I wouldn’t be the first to pursue that line of inquiry. It's all blowing hot air one way or another. I write what I’ve been calling my “Fuck Journals” and I make short post-porn videos about realising fantasies.
What did I do last night? Sunk a bottle of red to myself and fell asleep at 10pm. Which is what I do often.
Why did you write Dear Mr Andrews?
Writing helps the feeling of compartmentalisation I have from leading several contradictory lives alongside one another. Mr Andrews is my masochistic crush. He’s a real person, a would-be john who ended up wrangling a free fuck with me and I felt a bit used by the whole scenario.
One afternoon, I was editing together a passage detailing my thoughts about sugar-baby culture at large, whilst simultaneously texting him. I was suddenly like:
“Fuck-it! What’s your email address darling?”
Writing to him became a methodology. It felt really good to address my highs and lows to someone who’s seen the world I circulate within from the other side. A total amnesty of information addressed to the perpetrator, the patriarchy, the paramour.
It’s as if to say; “If you’re gonna Fuck me like that, well Fuck me harder!”
Dear Mr Andrews is a collection of key moments from my time escorting divulged to the object of my affection. It’s not all about sex though; it’s about self-medication, societal norms, hypocrisy, dating, discos, Mr Andrews and I.
The obsession and the obscenity of the content became quite extreme. There’s something about using the second person that allows me to exact some of the aggression I don’t unleash in everyday life. Contrary to my written tone, I’m softly spoken and painfully awkward IRL.
It’s also important for me to write these things down for balance. I might have got something out of it financially, I may even have gotten off on it, but essentially I’ve been fluffing chauvinist egos for the best part of eight years and these are the power structures we’re all beholden to. It’s important I talk about my experiences out loud or else… they’ve won and we can’t be having that!
* * *
Lotte Latham is a wanton experientialist who likes to see her fantasies made real. A suburban girl with a bee in her bonnet. Lotte is a fine art grad, with a background in window dressing and sex work. Hopelessly inspired by the likes of Kathy Acker, Sophie Calle and Chris Kraus, her route to writing came as a way of working out the knots that come from a host of complex experimentation.
Dear Mr Andrews will be released in August 2023. Pre-orders are available here: gutspublishing.com/product-page/dear-mr-andrews
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