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However good and even important this long detailed memoir of working in the oil industry in Alberta, Canada between 2005 and 2008 may be, it ain’t an easy one to recommend. You wouldn’t call it a misery memoir, but it is profoundly unhappy. Part of it is about rape: this comment by Kate Beaton on p 381 encapsulates the horror � the situation is a very common one and is surely not limited to the hyper-masculine world of the oilfields � people are getting wrecked at a party, the woman is drunk, the guy is drunk, but he’s not too drunk to push her into a dark room and assault her. Thinking back on it later Kate says to her friend

It felt like I had a second to decide and an eternity to live with it

Decide to resist, that is, to scream or to not scream. She doesn’t and when she inadvertently tells two guys about it later they laugh. We were there and y’all were both drunk as fuck, we all were. C'mon. In the afterword Kate says

I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.

So this whole book is about the moral Grey Zone, how women in a 99% male workforce get constantly sniped at and leered at and drooled over and every aspect of their being commented on and fantasized about and lied about and how they find themselves going along with it and putting up with such a lot they wouldn’t ever tolerate in the “real world� back home for one tiny minute. Kate makes it clear only half of the guys are gross pigs, but that’s still a lot. It’s also a story about her own acknowledged naivete about things like the widespread use of cocaine by the guys and � a big one this � how your own brother, your own father, should he be cooped up in an oil camp for a couple of years with no other company that bored rowdy men, might very well become just like one of the leering jeering locker-room nasty-comment guys. That was a sickening realisation for her.



Given all of the above, this graphic memoir might not be for everybody.