Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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She’s very talented but maybe instead of streaming words together that make no sense, maybe she could right in a way that does.

As stated by Adrian Edmondson’s Lenny, a wheezing, ruined Lucian Freud-esque artist: “The problem is, you don’t know your place. She then lived in 43 different places between 16 and 29, “hopping from bed to bed, from trauma to trouble”. It’s absorbing and resolutely non-gritty; be prepared for a body materialising in a well-tended front garden. Poor women like her, she argues, are not supposed to speak up unless it is through a Take a Break journalist or a producer of a Channel 5 poverty-porn show. Similarly, Rain Dogs (already on HBO in the US) refuses to play out an anguished, one-dimensional treatise on class and poverty for audiences to sigh and weep over.At first I wasn’t sure about this show: it seemed stagey and garish (Margate transformed into a Technicolor riviera). A superb cast (Lesley Manville, Conleth Hill) leads this sleuthing mystery series (originally shown on BritBox), dramatised by Anthony Horowitz from his own novel. Her book has developed, in part, from a fictional one-woman spoken word show, “ Refuge Woman”, which she has toured in collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Battersea Arts Centre.

She’s a single mother, raising a child in a city she loves, with no support network and a history of domestic abuse. This book takes you to places you do not want to go but that you need to go to understand just what other people's lives are like. Together they are a formidable team and have bonded in a way that only their shared life experiences could bring. Det är bara så naket och ärligt att jag gråter där jag går längs Mölndalsån, till mitt fasta jobb med bra lön, knäckebröds-låda och smör och ost i kylen. Jambo is a 37-year-old man with “mental health” having a birthday pint in the pub and trying to fathom his impoverished life.There isn’t anything she does not want to share from “my tragic and dirty little life” from her vagina size (small) to her suicide (unsuccessful).