Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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On Netflix, Lee Sung Jin’s new 10-part black comedy Beef (from A24, the production company behind Oscar-garlanded film Everything Everywhere All at Once) is the epitome of (drawl it, hipster-style): “Well, that escalated quickly. Supporting characters (Maria Bello’s uber-wealthy White Lotus-esque monster; David Choe as an unhinged cousin) slot right in.

This book was very open and frank and details the authors memoir of austerity Britain bringing up a child alone through doing sex work and moving from place to place.Catrina Davies eventually attempted to answer it by living in a corrugated-iron shed near Land’s End. She has grown up with violence, suffering regular beatings from her mother, who kicked her out at 16. She can’t find her best friend, Gloria (Ronke Adékoluejo) – last spotted hungover in a telephone box – so she reluctantly goes to slippery Selby (Jack Farthing), who is recently out of prison. But Carraway’s own experience of living on the breadline, and a steadfast avoidance of romanticising the actualities of homelessness, keep the series firmly in reality.

The reason I can’t rate this higher is really down to the structure of the writing, which gets a bit messy towards the end of the book. Just as Amy and Danny oscillate between sympathetic and deranged, the characters around them are also complicated: from Danny’s crypto-currency-obsessed brother, Paul (Young Mazino), to Amy’s drippy husband, George, played by Joseph Lee (“I’m micro-dosing my creativity”). Cash Carraway puts me in mind of Nelson Algren or Hubert Selby with their stories of degraded urban life, in this case with the vowels of Penge rather than New York. She then lived in 43 different places between 16 and 29, “hopping from bed to bed, from trauma to trouble”. Her “You’re only one Tory government away from an IRA comeback” sounds like an anarchist rant until you reflect that the present government is prepared to sacrifice peace in Northern Ireland on the altar of Brexit.Costello is a woman who can handle herself, and Cooper’s unhesitant skill of switching from comedy to tragedy within the space of a scene is a marvel. Rain Dogs is a co-production with HBO, an American broadcaster responsible for some of TV’s glossiest, most expensive shows: Succession, Game of Thrones, The White Lotus. Through the cheap jokes at her own expense emerge the turning points of her life: the ever-present question about the wreck of her own childhood: “What makes a mother reject her child?

Listen, learn, and stop falling for the poverty porn lies pedalled by our media, our government, and those who have more money than the people they hate could ever dream of. Cash is *determined* to tell her woeful story of poverty and deprivation even if the facts don’t seem to tally with it. Lots of things about living in a woman’s refuge make me laugh,” she says, which is not the most common response.Human beings shouldn't have to be saints to be deserving of respect, and Carraway isn't going to pretend to be - not to fit a neat media-friendly image of a victim.