I liked Evelyn Lau's Choose Me a lot. I admit to having known her when she was just getting over being a hooker (and told her to get out of spandex and mini-minis and wear skirts to her knees to please her new market). The Social Service bureaucrats in Victoria wanted all of the ten thousand dollar advance on her first book, saying she owed it to them because she'd been on their rolls since she was fourteen. The head woman wouldn't talk to me. A ten thousand dollar advance for a book written by a child in care? All the lights went out. They could cope with anything but success. Their lawyer, with the voice of an older man, called her a slut and other Protestant names, implying that she was someone who should not be published but should probably be put in jail. He sounded to me like someone fearful of being named in her book.

Lau produces a serious work of poetry or prose nearly every year. It's her day job. In the past, and even occasionally now, critics, even politically correct ones who know social pressures and bad parents put her out onto the street, although they try not to, still sound as if they are holding their noses and breathing through their mouths when they write reviews of her work. It appears that other authors can work specific turfs, but someone who writes about people whose lives are completely, and not always joyously, concerned with sex is often suspected of being Politically Incorrect. Lau knows what she knows, take it or leave it.

[Robert Harlow / BCBW 2000]