Poor: Grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief by Katriona Sullivan Review + Free Download | EPUB, MOBI

Partway through her account of her mother, Katriona O’Sullivan stops and admits she keeps wanting to delete it. She writes down what Tilly said and did, feels a flood of protectiveness, and wants to erase the lot — afraid the record of neglect will outweigh the love, and that committing it to print will cost her the mother she has left. It is among the most honest sentences in a memoir that does not run short of them.

Poor is the story of how O’Sullivan got from one life into another. Born in Coventry to two Irish parents who were heroin addicts, she grew up through poverty, sexual abuse, her father’s prison terms, spells in care, and a pregnancy at fifteen. At twenty she moved to Dublin, hit what she recognised as bottom, went through rehab, and found her way into the Trinity Access Programme — the route that ended in a psychology degree, a PhD, and the university post she holds now. The book is a memoir. It is also, unmistakably, an argument.

O’Sullivan does not leave you guessing about that argument. She works today on widening access to education and has spoken at the UN; she tells you plainly that she is appalled by educators who assume poor children lack the wherewithal for university, and that she fights that assumption daily. The book indicts systems with care — the police who treat children as “vermin, in the same way a farmer might see a den of fox cubs,” the prison officers who assault her mother at every visit, the mother-and-baby hostels built on the contradiction of supporting young women while monitoring them for failure. The case is that poverty is structural and that much of the cruelty is administrative. The case is made well.

And yet the rescue, when it comes, is never structural. It is always a person. Mrs Arkinson, the teacher who tells her she reads beautifully. Mr Pickering, the ex-miner turned English teacher, who hands her half his sandwich and a stack of paperbacks and then tells her father to be ashamed of himself. Kay the social worker, whose warm palm O’Sullivan can feel through her shirt as she is finally walked out of a squat. Joe Dowling at the community centre. Marian the counsellor. And Irena, who runs the access programme. When O’Sullivan is a week from her exams and has decided to throw the whole thing away, no programme saves her. Irena turns up at her door: “If I have to come over here and drag you by the scruff over to do those exams, then fine, I will.”

Here is the quiet problem the book never quite turns to face. Its thesis asks for systems — more access programmes, more services, more safe spaces — because systems can be funded and made to scale. But the evidence it offers, scene after scene, is the irreplaceable individual: the particular adult who decided, with nothing requiring it, to see one child. That kind of help resists scaling. You can fund a Trinity Access Programme. You cannot legislate that someone inside it will arrive uninvited at nine in the morning and refuse to leave.

It would be unfair to say the structure did nothing. Without the access programme, O’Sullivan and Irena never meet; the system is what put the right person in the room. But the book does not make that argument either. It does not stop to work out how structure and individual attention depend on each other — it alternates between blaming the one and crediting the other. The most interesting idea in Poor is the relationship between a programme and the people who happen to staff it, and it is the idea the book is too busy to examine, because it is trying to be a memoir and a manifesto at once.

The strain shows in the prose. O’Sullivan is a psychologist now, and she annotates the child’s experience with vocabulary she acquired later — the notion of a set point, of euphoric recall — explanations that sometimes pre-digest a scene that would land harder raw. The book is strongest when it refuses to explain. When the child tells her mother what her uncle did to her, the reply is four flat words, and O’Sullivan sets them on the page and adds nothing. She doesn’t need to. As a girl she learned to read a room the way a prey animal reads moving grass for snakes — an instinct she had long before she had any word for it, and the most exact psychology in the book is the kind she came by that way, unannotated.

O’Sullivan called the book Poor — one word, and it carries both senses, the economic fact and the older, softer one, the word said over someone pitied and loved at the same time. Its prescriptions are familiar and will be argued elsewhere. What the book holds that nothing else does is Tilly. It keeps returning to her, and to a line O’Sullivan reports as her mother’s motto through the worst years, when she was selling herself behind the church wall for drug money: “I just need enough for gear and chips for the kids.” Seven words that carry a failure and a love at once, without letting either win, and that do more than any policy passage in the book. Poor set out to leave its reader with a prescription. What it leaves instead is one woman, seen whole — which is the thing no programme can be funded to do.