I've begun reading Clementine Ford's collection of personal essays about love. Exquisitely heart breaking and tender, she recollects stories of motherly love, first loves, high school crushes and platonic relationships. 

At times she discusses at length the painstaking experience of a teenage girl who wades through the world in a body she hates, a social hierarchy she doesn't quite know where she slots into, and a family that doesn't seem to 'get' her, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't see myself in that young girl too. 

How We Love makes me want to unravel time to back to 2004 and give angry, unsure, anxious, self-loathing, terrified fourteen-year-old me a big squeeze and a huge dollop of self love; something that was very much lacking from my teenage years. And maybe a quick word on how to correctly apply eyeliner.

I actually first encountered Clementine more than ten years ago, although it was many years later when I connected the dots that the author who's articles I had been consuming for years was also the author of a very memorable story one evening in a dimly lit bar.

I was in my second year of university, up to my eyeballs in creative writing assignments and late night compulsory readings, aided by (or in hindsight, probably hindered by) cheap wine and cans of red bull. Along with a small handful of other students in my course, I had been given the great honour of being an official reviewer for the Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne, writing reviews of the program for our university magazine. We were given fancy-looking lanyards with our names on them in big letters, next to REVIEWER and I felt the flurry of excitement that this was confirmation a career in writing might actually be viable. 

I arrived at the first event an hour early, so with a friend, we drank cheap champagne at the bar downstairs until it was ready to go up, only to realise the event had started an hour earlier than I thought, and I'd missed the whole thing. Luckily my writing was better than my time-keeping skills.

I made sure not to make the same mistake with the next event; the highly popular festival favourite Dirty Words. It was held at The Toff in Town, an intimate bar about three storeys high in a building on Swanston Street in Melbourne's CBD that was popular with students. My creative writing teacher was speaking at it, so I knew I had to make a good impression. I checked the start time about a hundred times.

As the name suggests, Dirty Words was a series of raunchy spoken word performances - a 'literary cabaret of erotica' if you will. The room filled with guests eagerly anticipating the raunchy repertoire that awaited us, candles glowed in red glass jars and there was a palpable buzz fuelled by red wine and cider.

Then, a hush over the room as the event commenced. A dark-haired woman told the hilarious (true) tale of how she broke up with her boyfriend, only to have sex with his sister later that day. A bespectacled woman with white hair and red-rimmed glasses (or at least that's how I remember her) read aloud a work of fiction she'd penned about two people meeting up in the fresh produce aisle of Coles and doing unspeakable things with a zucchini before popping it back on the pile (I avoided buying zucchini for months after this). My university lecturer told a tale of a wayward erection.

The piece that stood out that night though was by a woman who told the true tale of how, for an extra bit of money, her and a friend decided they would be sex-phone operators. She regaled how her friend had quite the knack for dirty talk and quickly banked up some hefty savings. This author, on the other hand, didn't quite possess the same skillset. Explaining that she was told that the 'trick is the put your finger in your mouth and make a wet sound', this author proceeded to demonstrate, sending the entire room into fits of laughter as she made without a doubt the un-sexiest possible noise. The gig was short-lived, apparently.

Twenty-year-old me was utterly enthralled by the entire evening and made a mental note that in a few short years, it'd be me up on that stage reading my work. I was going to be just like all these incredible writers, especially the one with the side-splitting story about being a phone sex operator, and I'm sure, I'm 99.999% sure, would almost-bet-my-life-on-it sure it was Clementine Ford.

Clementine has of course gone on to write three books and countless columns, plus host a podcast; facing backlash, criticism, controversy, awards and loads of admiration along the way, while my own writing career over the years has taken the downtown train to corporate land. Possibly for the best, as I'm about as thick-skinned as a peeled boiled egg. Someone once left a comment on a travel blog I ran for a start-up, calling me a 'travel-blogging wanker from Sydney who doesn't know anything' and it still stings. Not in the least because I'm from Melbourne.

But still, every now and then, between SEO keywords and social media captions I daydream about having the opportunity to get up on that stage. In a dimly lit bar with a red wine in hand, I'd share my own offerings worthy of a literary cabaret of erotica, leaving the audience in stitches with my own renditions of witty repartee and salacious stories.

Dirty words? I've got plenty.