Trust: A True Story of Women & Gangs

NZSA E.H. MCCORMICK BEST FIRST BOOK OF NON-FICTION AWARD WINNER

Trust: A True Story of Women & Gangs
Pip Desmond
Random House NZ
ISBN 978-1-86979-243-5
RRP $39.99

The Aroha Trust was a women’s work cooperative set up in 1977, the heady years of feminism, community activism and the first stirrings of the Maori renaissance. It eventually folded, but the friendships endured. Trust tells the women’s stories with the respect and compassion that comes from a shared bond over 30 years. By turns angry, funny, hair-raising, and tender, it celebrates the women’s struggles to overcome their pasts and build a future for their children. As a unique insight into New Zealand’s social history and a way to understand women and gangs, it is without peer.

Pip Desmond is a freelance writer and journalist who has spent most of her working life in the community sector, both paid and unpaid. In 2000, she became Labour Minister Ruth Dyson's press secretary before doing the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2006, where she wrote the first draft of Trust: A True Story of Women and Gangs. The book recounts her experiences in her early 20s as a member of Aroha Trust, a work cooperative for gang women in Wellington, where she learnt to paint and renovate houses, cut scrub, and lay cats eyes on the city streets. Pip has also worked as a bus driver, barmaid, caterer and cleaner. She is married with three children and two beautiful grand-children. This is her first book.