Roche left home in 1993 and founded with three female friends the garage rock group The Dubinskis. She obtained initial stage experience in drama groups during her time at school.

She left school after the 11th grade, at the age of 17. She grew up in a rather alternative cultural environment in a family with liberal views.

She has lived in Germany since the age of eight, having previously lived in London and the Netherlands. Roche, who is bilingual in English and German, is the daughter of an engineer and a politically and artistically active mother. Punky alienated teenager, young woman reclaiming her body from the tyranny of repressive hygiene (women mustn't smell, excrete, desire), bratty smartass, lonely daughter, shock merchant, and pleasure seeker-Helen is all of these things and more, and her frequent attempts to assert her maturity ultimately prove just how fragile, confused, and young she truly is.Ĭharlotte Elisabeth Grace Roche is a British-born German television presenter, actress, singer and author. From a hospital bed, where she's recovering from an operation and lamenting her parents' divorce, Helen ruminates on her past sexual and physical adventures in 'a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct-both physical and psychological-of Helen's body and mind' ( The New York Times). Helen Memel is an outspoken eighteen-year-old, whose childlike stubbornness is offset by a precocious sexual confidence. and Melissa P.'s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Charlotte Roche's debut novel-which sold more than a million copies in Germany alone-exposes the double bind of female sexuality, delivering a compulsively readable and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the repercussions of family trauma. In the tradition of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Clearly the novel has struck a nerve, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women's roles and image in society.A sexual, scatological, international sensation: 'A cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women's world' (Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times). It gives a detailed topography of Helen's hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and - here is where the debate kicks in - just possibly female empowerment. Wetlands opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident.

It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel. The book is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator's body and mind. Since its debut in February, the novel ('Feuchtgebiete,' in German) has sold more than a million copies, and is the biggest selling book on Amazon anywhere in the world. With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel's 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Charlotte Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany.

Wetlands by charlotte roche ebook