| Elizabeth Hudson has spent the past 30 years as a stay-at-home mom in a Calgary suburb. Stylish and articulate, she looks and acts like the typical middle-class, middle-aged woman, but for a long time she lived in fear that someone would discover her past and use it to hurt her two sons.
Her secret: she was once a drug-addicted prostitute on the streets of Calgary and Vancouver.
Now, after three decades of actively hiding her past, Hudson has decided she wants people to hear her story in the hope that it will help other young women get off the street. To that end, she has written a book about her experiences called Snow Bodies: One Woman’s Life on the Streets, which has just been published by NeWest Press.
Hudson says deciding to end the secrecy was a very difficult, painful decision. For a while, she says, she wrote the book in the third person because it was too painful to "own" the main character.
"From my experience, it’s best never to tell anyone about it because it’s a really taboo subject. People feel you’re tainted," she says. "I lived in huge, huge fear someone would find out and shame my sons for my sins."
Hudson’s memoir is a haunting, disturbing and fascinating portrayal of life on the streets. Unlike many memoirs, which devote numerous pages to reflection, Hudson simply describes her experiences without any analysis and this makes the book even more compelling.
"I wanted to show, day to day, year to year, what that life was," she says. "You didn’t have time to reflect on what was happening."
Hudson, whose father was a doctor, grew up in a middle-class family and spent her teenage years in Calgary’s well-to-do Mount Royal neighbourhood. However, at age 18, she dropped out of university, got involved with a wrong guy and became hooked on heroin. After Hudson’s boyfriend Peter was sent to jail for armed robbery and her parents disowned her, Hudson ended up working as a prostitute to feed her habit.
Her memoir is a brutally honest, unflinching portrayal of addiction and the life of a prostitute. Hudson makes no effort to portray herself as a victim or cast herself in a sympathetic light. Still, the reader is left haunted by many scenes that show how marginalized prostitutes are in our society.
In the book, Hudson is propositioned by her probation officer, forced to give a cop a blow job, beaten by her pimp and ripped off by supposed friends. She also ends up in jail and is attacked by various other prostitutes. In one of the most disturbing scenes in the book, Hudson gets severely beaten by a john in a hotel room and no one comes to her aid despite her screaming.
She also clearly shows the hold addiction had on her and other people on the street. In one episode, she is at a fellow addict’s apartment when the police raid the place looking for drugs. The cops destroy the apartment, even ripping up the furniture, linoleum and carpet, but the addicts are thrilled because the drugs are never found. Another time, Hudson’s addict friend decides to buy a plane ticket to Vancouver on the spur of the moment because there’s no heroin to be found in Calgary.
Hudson was eventually able to get off the street after a friend named Jack let her stay at his apartment. She then fell in love with one of Jack’s friends and she says that changed her life.
Recently, Hudson has started volunteering at Servants Anonymous, an organization that helps people get out of prostitution. She says that, despite the fact there are now more outreach services for people in the sex trade, the life is more dangerous than ever.
According to Hudson, because of police crackdowns, prostitutes are often forced to work in residential or industrial areas, rather than a main strip where they can look out for one another. And she says Canada hasn’t done enough to help make life safer for prostitutes.
"The body count is rising," she says. "If you are a sex predator, women on the street are easy targets. Society really doesn’t care because, if it did, we’d do something about it."
Hudson says Canadian cities need to consider creating red-light districts modelled after Amsterdam, where women can legally and safely work in the sex trade. She says right now, women often don’t seek help because they’re terrified of getting busted for drugs or prostitution.
"These women are incredibly hunted, " she says. "There’s no safe place for these women."
Hudson is hopeful that her book will reach other women in the sex trade who want to get out of the life. "If even one person at risk reads it or someone who wants to make the transition reads it, it will be worth it," she says.
Hudson is reading from Snow Bodies at Pages Books on Kensington on Friday, April 23 at 7:30 p.m. |
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