Lucia Domenica’s Operator 56: A Call, a Kiss and a Body Count is, on its surface, a memoir of survival: a brutal childhood, an unhappy marriage, four daughters to support, and an improbable passage through telephone sex lines and Sydney brothels. It is funny, confronting, frequently shocking and, above all, extraordinarily candid.

Yet beneath the sex, danger and dark humour lies something much sadder and, to me, more interesting. This is a book about connection, particularly about people who cannot find it.

Domenica’s years as “Operator 56”, and later working in brothels, provide a fascinating insight into the sex industry and the bewildering variety of male desire. There are peccadillos, fantasies, loneliness, entitlement and occasionally genuine tenderness. What surprised me most was the willingness of Lucia and some of her colleagues to step outside the relative safety of the workplace and meet clients personally, despite experiences that might reasonably have persuaded them never to do so again.

Again and again, the men in Lucia’s world are seeking something they cannot quite articulate. Sometimes it is sex. Often it seems to be intimacy, affection or simply acknowledgement. Some are dangerous; others merely sad. Even those capable of kindness frequently carry their own darkness and loneliness with them. Lucia, paradoxically, is searching for much the same thing.

Her husband gradually becomes almost an absence within the memoir: emotionally useless to Lucia, largely useless to their daughters and seemingly incapable of providing the affection or security she has sought since childhood. His eventual lonely death is a bleak conclusion to a life already characterised by disconnection.

For a male reader, this can be an uncomfortable book. Men repeatedly appear as threats, burdens, emotional parasites or damaged people attempting to take from women what they cannot create within themselves. Yet Domenica never turns the book into a manifesto against men. There are moments of sweetness and kindness too, which perhaps make the failures of connection more poignant.

What prevents Operator 56 from becoming relentlessly bleak is Domenica herself. She writes without embarrassment and with almost ferocious self-deprecation. There is little attempt to disguise, romanticise or excuse her decisions. She simply lays them out. The result is sometimes hilarious, sometimes painful and occasionally almost unbearably sad.

Each chapter closes with a small reflection or lesson: resilience, friendship, compassion, courage, women supporting women, giving the memoir something of the structure of a modern fable.

But the image that remained with me was simpler. A child who once desperately needed someone to be kind to her grows into a woman still searching for enduring kindness. She finds it in friendships, in her devotion to her daughters and occasionally in fleeting encounters, but rarely in the men with whom she shares her life. That lingering loneliness gives Operator 56 its unexpected emotional weight. Beneath all the outrageous stories is a deeply human question: how much of a life can be spent searching for someone who will simply treat us well?