Lying with one man, whose asinine arguments as to why she should touch him have exhausted her, she turns her head so as not to see his nakedness, and hopes for amnesia tomorrow. She is ‘a knotted stomach in the centre of caressed limbs she doesn’t believe in’. Another man delivers the post-coital line, ‘It doesn’t matter about the outside’, a comment Kate accepts with gratitude: ‘How marvellous, not to be bullshitted about being beautiful when she is not.’ A third man, a sleazy hotel clerk, forges ahead with an unwanted grope masquerading as a massage, while Kate, ‘her stomach tense’, berates herself for not saying no more clearly, consoling herself, at the same time, that ‘It’s only skin.’

I say ‘protagonist Kate’ because The Romantic is quite a different book from the one it purports to follow, and it defines memoir differently. In My Skin (2005), Holden’s first book, written in the first person, is a memoir that traces the trajectory of a bookish young woman compelled into prostitution by heroin addiction. Despite the desperation at its centre, an energy of subversive daring and bravado pulses through In My Skin, albeit regularly syncopated by self-lacerating observation, as the well-read Kate embarks on a type of picaresque journey. Despite its darker moments of self-scrutiny – a recognition of the corrosive effects of suppressed rage and self-loathing, an awareness of a nascent hardness in herself – its redemptive ending invites the reader to hope for the best for its bruised protagonist.

Where In My Skin’s Kate is rendered in the first person, the prostitute at its centre is known as Lucy, a character confected by Kate for each shift at work. While Lucy discovers a liking for her craft, part of this is about Kate’s enjoyment of adornment and a sense of her desirability, and part is about the creation of character. It would be obtuse to suggest that the energy of In My Skin is only that of the Künstlerroman, with Kate’s emergence through Lucy into writing, yet it is part of it.

But if Lucy enables some kind of agency in Kate – some kind of liberation, despite the harsh and relentless aspects of prostitution and addiction the memoir charts – the third person of The Romantic seems less successful as a pivot. The third person reaches towards fiction, but curtails the Kate who emerges. That the curvy nude on the book’s cover has been partially decapitated (she keeps her mouth) is not a good omen.

Generically, In My Skin provides access to an occupation the way memoir often does. It centres on the various men who crawl the kerbs and frequent the brothels where Lucy works. A catalogue emerges, not of men per se, but of heterosexual men who pay for sex. The Romantic catalogues other men, other kinds of sex, and the book’s marketing (‘sexy, dark and intoxicating’) promises a tale that might find comparisons in the recent proliferation of blogs and memoirs of female sexuality such as Abby Lee’s/Zoe Margolis’ Girl With a One-Track Mind, a sex-and-the-city genre disparaged as ‘clit-lit’. Yet, as with Kate’s experience as Lucy, in The Romantic female desire and agency are rarely central to the equation.

Kate often seeks delight and finds fury: the men she meets seem endlessly to repeat a pattern familiar from the brothel. ‘Animals’, Kate thinks at one point: ‘You’re nothing but animals.’ During a threesome with Guido’s brother Massimo and Massimo’s friend Nanno, she has moments of exaltation: ‘She has never felt so cradled, so taken, so occupied.’ This is followed by a hideous scene in which Guido, in a ‘room full of winter shadows’, exacts his punishment. Afterwards, Kate thinks of herself again as a puttana, a whore. She assumes responsibility for a dark roomful of rage and guilt. The lucid, poetic style of which Holden is capable is evident in that detail, as is the lightness of touch, whereby the literal resonates to suggest more about Kate’s state of mind and being.

While Kate enjoys Anaïs Nin’s model of sensuality and agency, The Romantic reminded me of another phase in her reading. At one stage, during her time as Lucy, Kate reads Holocaust memoirs. The Romantic is so filled with sorrow and abjection that it calls to mind memoirs of atrocity and trauma theory. Trauma’s belatedness – its production of repeated effects long after its origins – is suggested in the loveless and mainly joyless experiences that Kate endures, which bear the trace of the commercial transactions she has left behind.

The memoir ends with Kate contemplating ruins that survive, ‘singular, brave, dazzled’. Someone has been hosing away dusty footprints, and Kate looks for a way home, between what can disappear, and what resilience protects.