Unladylike
'One of the greatest wrestling memoirs I've had the pleasure to have read... Unladylike was a great reminder of why I fell in love with wrestling to begin with' Mick Foley{::}**
**
Forget what you think you know about wrestling.
In the world of Heather Honeybadger, aka Rana Venenosa, there are no steroids, no tans, no million-dollar contracts – there is only lycra, a sweaty underground club and an unbreakable resilience. From the day that Heather steps into the ring of the punk wrestling school Lucha Britannia, she finds herself transformed into a person she never knew she could be.
How do you become a wrestler when you hate sports so much you can't do a press-up? What makes feminists and wrestlers both mortal enemies and unlikely best friends? For the first time, an independent female wrestler talks in depth about how she went from a sad, lost riot grrrl to an empowered, persevering fighter who has performed across the world.
Unladylike is a feminist romp like no other – hard-hitting, life-affirming and funny, just like the women who find themselves in the ring.
In 2011, Heather Bandenburg moved to London with a degree in Gender Studies and a job in a call centre. While dealing with crippling anxiety and zero-hours contracts, she stumbled on Lucha Britannia, a group of wrestlers who train and perform under a railway arch in East London. Despite knowing nothing about wrestling and an almost heroic aversion to exercise, Heather had finally discovered something that she was good at.
Six years later, she’d made a name for herself as La Rana Venenosa – the Queen of the Sewer, performing in London, and acting as a referee for two other leading UK women's promotions. Since then, her writing on women’s wrestling has been featured in the Guardian, DIVA and the Independent; and she has contributed to articles in Vanity Fair and a variety of TV and radio shorts.