Fire-eating stripper. Sex worker. Doctor. Author. It’s a list that would be unusual on anyone’s CV. But then Lauren Roche isn’t just anyone. The 63-year-old agrees she’s led a “pretty extraordinary” life. Having moved to Northland in 2014, Lauren now spends her days pottering on her rural property and writing books. That includes two memoirs about her colourful life, including 2000’s Bent Not Broken, in which Lauren details her journey from abused childhood to sex work and eventually to medical school.
A year later, the mother of two adult sons published Life On The Line, which detailed her further trials from bankruptcy and depression to attempted suicide. The oldest of three children, Wellington-born Lauren admits her childhood was turbulent, and included sexual abuse by a family friend, a move overseas to Australia and the loss of her mother.
A mothers struggle, a daughters pain
“Mum struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, and mental health issues,” recalls Lauren.
“She fatally overdosed when I was 14.”
Leaving school at 15, Lauren did everything from sex work and baking to cleaning at Wellington Hospital – ironically the same place she later worked in as a doctor. A year later, she stowed
away on a US naval ship, spending 21 days hiding in a tiny cupboard. She was subsequently arrested for being an illegal immigrant and spent three weeks in a Texas jail before being deported.
A life-changing question
While in Wellington Hospital after a failed suicide attempt, a doctor asked Lauren if she had any dreams for her life.
“I told him I’d always wanted to be a doctor and he laughed,” she recalls.
“While I was in the psych unit, I realised my life was turning into my mother’s. “The only way I thought that I could change it was through education. I decided to study medicine because it was the biggest, most challenging thing I could find.”
Lauren put herself through the last year of high school and six years at Otago Medical School, juggling the care of her two infant sons with her grandmother and regularly waking up at 4am to study.
“I often felt like a fish out of water at med school,” she admits.
“I thought I’d get kicked out because I wasn’t good enough, but one of the professors said, ‘We need more doctors like you. Keep going.’”
A career cut short
Lauren eventually worked as a GP and in hospices across the North Island, including Napier, Palmerston North, Auckland and Whangārei, before she and her partner Graham Allen relocated to
a rural Tutukaka property.
Lauren might still be a doctor if it wasn’t for the spinal cord injury she suffered during routine back surgery.
“I was training for my second Ironman competition when I hurt my back,” she says.
“The surgery affected my balance and left me incontinent, so I could no longer work as a GP.”
Finding solace in storytelling
Despite her turbulent childhood, Lauren was surrounded by books, and learned to love reading and writing.
“I started crafting my memoirs, not for publication, but so I could figure my life out,” she says.
“Friends who read it said my story might be able to help others.”
With a master’s degree in creative writing under her belt, in 2022, Lauren published her first fiction book Mila And The Bone Man, set in Northland. She’s now followed that with a historical novel based on one of Queenstown’s pioneering women, Julia Eichardt. It was inspired by a conversation Lauren’s publisher had.
Discovering Julia Eichardt
“He asked his sister if she could name any prominent women who changed the history of Queenstown and she couldn’t,” she explains.
“He heard about Julia Eichardt, who’d come from Ireland and who in 1863 ended up running what is now Eichardt’s Private Hotel in Queenstown. Julia also brought electricity to the hotel, making it the first to have electric light in the town.”
Lauren spent a few nights staying at the waterfront hotel, learning about the woman she calls “incredibly resilient and a real dynamo”.
Which could also describe Lauren. Never one to sit still, she’s currently working on her next book, a historical fiction novel set in the 1850s and based on the writers of the medical textbook Grey’s Anatomy. Lauren is also keen to dust off a manuscript she wrote for her master’s thesis about death.
Writing with purpose
“I’ve written a lot about death,” she says.
“But having worked in medicine and at hospices, it’s something I’ve seen a bit of.”
While Lauren admits leaving medicine was “a real wrench”, she’s happy being a full-time writer.
“The heath system is so underfunded and being a doctor is such a stressful occupation that I wouldn’t go back,” she admits.
“If I can use my writing in any way to help with people’s health issues or concerns, then I will.”
Julia Eichardt: A Life Of Grit And Grace ($37, Flying Books Publishing) is out now.
If you’re struggling with your mental health, text or call 1737 at any time to speak to a trained counsellor for free. For the Suicide Crisis Helpline, dial 0508 TAUTOKO. In an emergency, call 111.
