'Fucking Hell'. The story of Truus Oldenburg

In 2018, with the help of a professional writer, Truus Oldenburg published her life story: Fucking Hell: Het verhaal van Truus Oldenburg. Truus, then a 58-year-old woman living in Amsterdam, felt the need to share her story to counter the taboo on problematic drug use. She felt that the addiction stigma negatively contributes to the suffering of people who experience drug problems. Contemporary research supports her feelings and shows that people with substance use disorders are confronted with denial, social rejection, and discrimination.

“Don’t be ashamed,” Truus writes.
“Talk about your experiences, to heal the pain.” [1]

The personal document that Truus Oldenburg has created is quite unique. Although the addiction memoir has become an established genre from the 19th century onwards, autobiographies that relate to the “epidemic” of heroin use that took Europe by surprise in the 1970s are quite scarce. Accounts written by women are even harder to find. Fucking Hell is one of very few autobiographical writings by women on their experiences in this period. A small number of female rock stars have published their memoires, such as Marianne Faithful. Also, German opiate user Christiane Felscherimow (whose famous autobiography Christiane F. was published in 1979) published her second autobiography in 2013 (Mein Zweites Leben). In the Netherlands, only a couple of women have put their stories on paper. One of them is Liesbeth Vollemans, the other is Truus.

Her book follows a storyline that is common to addiction recovery narratives: she writes about the start of her drug use in the early 1970s, about hitting “rock bottom” in 1990, and about finding her way towards recovery since then. Within this familiar master narrative, however, the many anecdotes Truus tells paint a uniquely detailed picture of daily life as a hard drug user and sex worker in Amsterdam at the time. They show her personal agency and resilience as well.

Truus grew up in a small town near Amsterdam, in a family where emotions were not shared and physical abuse was a common occurrence. Truus believed her parents knew about the sexual abuse she suffered since she was 11 years old, which was inflicted on her by someone her parents knew, but this abuse was never talked about. In 1974, when she was 14 years old, Truus ran away from home with her boyfriend, whom she met in a local dance club. He turned out to be a pimp and rented a room for her in the Amsterdam Red Light District. She was supposed to earn money for the both of them.

After some time, Truus ditched her “boyfriend” and became an independent sex worker, together with her new friend Conny, a girl whom she met in a club. Conny had also had run away from home. It was Conny who offered heroin to Truus for the first time. She loved it: “This delicious stuff shattered away all the sharp edges that had formed in my mind. I felt nothing anymore and for the first time in ages I experienced peace.” For years, they worked together as street prostitutes. As Truus states in her book, she now worked to support her heroin habit, instead of to support men. She started calling herself “Evelien” and had that name tattooed on her arm. “Evelien was a bitch,” Truus writes in her memoirs. “You didn’t want to mess with her”. 

Later on, Truus was married a couple of times as well, to men who were drug dealers. Both marriages ended badly. Several attempts to quit the habit on her own failed. Heroin and methadone use were combined with excessive and increasing consumption of (crack) cocaine. For a while, she was homeless and sleeping on the streets. In 1990, Truus was arrested by the police for drug dealing. After prison, she chose to go to a therapeutic community for addiction treatment. This time, she did manage to quit her drug use successfully. In her book, she talks about being grateful to have survived, and about leaning to take care of herself. She started feeling like the old Truus again, a “loving and sweet person.” Symbolically, she had the tattoo of “Evelien” removed.

In this short video that was produced for the Narcotic City Archive, Truus takes us to “her old neighbourhood,” as she calls the Zeedijk area. She still regularly goes back there, to walk around and remember.

On this map, you can find more information on the bars, clubs, and streets that Truus mentions in the video, and about other places and spaces related to drug use in Amsterdam since the 1960s.

[1] Dutch quotes from the book were translated by Gemma Blok