5 things I want you to know before you read 'Underclass'
Excited to read my memoir? Read this first.
Underclass comes out in a few weeks’ time, and there are some things I want you to know before you read it.
1. It’s not an autobiography
Underclass is not a blow-by-blow account of my life. It doesn’t start when I was born. It doesn’t even start when I was a little girl. Its not a ‘and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this other thing happened, and then the next day, we went to the fayre’. Nothing more boring than that.
Underclass is the weaving together of two parts of my life. It is a memoir that shows you all how my teenage years intersect, dance, and move within a few short months of my life at around 28 years old. The way everything I thought I had moved on from, suddenly came back up for me, and was thrust in my face. Memories, narratives, beliefs, experiences – all came to the surface and I suddenly had to defend myself – when I wasn’t even sure why.
Each chapter is dated, so you can feel your way through the book – especially as I move from stories from my teen years, to stories from my career, years later.
Memoirs can be crafted in many different ways, and as the author, we have much power over the way we present our stories, our plots and our messages. I chose to present mine as the constant parallels between my wild life as a teenage girl – and the settled life of a mother of two children, doing a PhD in Forensic Psychology. In ‘Underclass’ those worlds collide (not by choice!), and I suddenly have to figure out who the fuck I am.
2. It’s important to show the complexity of real life
I will never forget reading a thread about me (by a complete stranger, of course), in which they and several others were discussing my life (or what they know of it). One of the people wrote, ‘She is either the unluckiest person in the whole world, or she is full of shit’, and a reply underneath, ‘Yeah. There is no way that many things have happened to one person!’
I remember reading that some years back, and wondering what lives they had lived. Did they get up every morning at the same time, make themselves a cup of tea, get showered at the same time, listening to Radio 4? Did they put on the same clothes they had had for years, go to the same job they had been in since they were 25, talk to their friends they had had since college, say hello to their elderly neighbour on the way out of the door? Did they pack the same lunch every day for themselves? Did they take the same route to work every day? Did nothing ever happen to them?
If anything, surely that is the unbelievable version of life. A life of monotony and repetition, where nothing ever happens to them, no one dies, no one becomes ill, no one abuses them, no one has any accidents, no one loses their job, no one is a victim of crime, no one betrays or lies to them. Who are these robots?
So, I just want you to know this: Underclass is filled with hundreds of weird, terrifying, funny, interesting, confusing, emotional, and inspirational things in my life. Some things in ‘Underclass’ will make you cringe yourself inside out. Others will have your head in your hands. Some will probably make you cry. I don’t think my life is extraordinary. Instead, I think everyone is living complex lives – they just don’t talk about them.
We don’t show our real lives, or our real selves to anyone. It’s too dangerous, most of the time. If we tell the truth about our messy, confusing, rollercoaster lives – people get uncomfortable. If we speak about who hurt us, who betrayed us, who loved us, who hated us – people want us to shut up. If we discuss the depths of our fears, our feelings and our thoughts – we are positioned as attention seeking or self-obsessed.
I want this book to demonstrate that I am a thousand things at once. So are you. You don’t have to fit into a box. You don’t have to be one thing. You could be a completely different person next month, if you wanted to.
3. It wasn’t cathartic, but it definitely made me realise some stuff
I know the stereotype of writing a memoir is that it is some form of catharsis – but that didn’t happen for me. I think it was because I had already processed so much of my own stuff from when I was younger, that I didn’t have anything to release.
As part of my own journey in my thinking, reading, writing, and my theories and philosophies on life, I have had to explore myself many times. I very often put myself back into specific parts of my life to test out my own theories. If I am teaching a concept, or developing a resource about sexual trauma, for example, I will very often spend days contemplating how I would have reacted to it when I was in different parts of my own trauma. Would I have needed it? Would I have denied it? Would I have triggered? Would I have hated it? Would it have been too much for me? Would it have confronted me?
Because of this, I have had to re-process hundreds of my own traumas.
Secondly, I have worked actively in forensic work for 14 years. I have been triggered by cases, court hearings, disclosures, reports and case files so many times, that I have had to reprocess my own stuff and rethink it many, many times. I remember this happening to me back in 2016, when I was writing a CSE resource for my old employer. I was sat chatting to a member of my team about the way teenage girls would be groomed and exploited. Specifically, we were talking about how quickly things would get out of hand, and girls would suddenly realise they were in a lot of danger, but of course, would have no power to get out of it.
I still remember to this day, totally zoning out. I stared at the clock on the wall. I had memories that had been buried somewhere, just hit me over and over again, like a shit montage. My colleague was trying to get my attention, but I couldn’t snap out of it. After a minute or two, it slowed down, and I just sat there, trying to understand where those memories had been hidden for over 13 years.
My work has meant facing my own stuff over and over again. When it came to writing the memoir, I think I was actually more focussed on getting the writing style right. I wanted Underclass to be a representation of me. I can be serious, academic, confident, ambitious, and insightful – but I can also be sharp, funny, moody, complicated, lost, and introverted. I wanted the book to reflect that – so I think that was my biggest challenge.
I actually wrote the structure and the beginning of the book and then rewrote it three times before I was happy with the way it was. Once I had my flow though, I was pretty fast. I wrote the whole book from start to finish in a few weeks.
It did however, cause some realisations for me. Mainly around my sexuality. There is a scene in the book where I go on a date with a guy, and we are back at his flat. Neither of us are into each other, and instead of having sex, we end up having this cute, weird, confused conversation about sex. Both of us ended up gay. I will never forget that conversation, and it was important to include it in the book.
I also wrote about a number of girls I dated or was involved with during my teen years, that I never told anyone about. I was so wrapped up in the violence, abuse and shit that was going on around me – but my oases were the stolen moments I had with girls around me whilst we convinced ourselves that we were definitely not gay.
4. The near-death experience I had was the hardest part to write about
There is a scene in ‘Underclass’ where at 16 years old, I nearly die. Even writing that out is weird. I hadn’t ever thought about, or written about that experience in nearly 20 years. I hadn’t really processed how close I had come to losing my life, until I was writing it out for the book.
Don’t get me wrong, there were many times where I was, and could have been, severely injured – but that one experience was the only time when I realised I was going to die, there was nothing I could do about it, and I was so desperate to escape my life, that I lay there and waited for the end.
Looking back on that moment, especially as a 33-year-old with so much life to live – and with teenagers myself – it was extremely difficult to write about. I felt so much love towards that 16-year-old version of myself. I just wanted to scoop her up and rescue her.
In the end, I chose honesty. I chose to write about it as clearly as I could, and I chose to sit quietly, and relive that moment for a while in order to write about it effectively. I hadn’t realised how vivid my memory was of that moment. I still have so many questions about why I survived. I will never have answers to them, that much I know.
When Jaimi read that part, she cried. It wasn’t that we hadn’t ever spoken of it before, but it was that she had never heard me speak in any detail. It was at that point that I realised I had never talked about that incident in any detail to anyone before, which is probably why it was so difficult to write about in the memoir.
I never set out to write about that experience, either.
5. I am probably going to write sequels
In my early twenties, I read every single book that Maya Angelou wrote about her life. She wrote seven memoirs, and each charted different parts of her rich, chaotic, amazing, life.
After I had finished writing ‘Underclass’, I realised why and how she had ended up writing seven books about her life. Nobody can fit their life into one book. Nobody. We don’t have one story to tell, we have thousands.
Underclass ends at a pivotal moment in my life. A phone call. The phone call that changed the course of my life forever. However, the book doesn’t explore or speak of anything that happened after 2019. It also doesn’t speak of anything between the age of 18 and 28. Nor does it discuss any event between 0-11 years old.
I am only 33 – and so I have so much left to live, experience, explore and figure out. As a writer, that naturally means that I have SO much left to write about. Who knows what the future holds for me? Maybe I will end up one of those robots that perplex me? A steady-going repetitive clone, doing the same things every single day until I die?
Or maybe I will become Prime Minister, like I planned when I was 11 years old.
Although, come to think of it, after ‘Underclass’ publishes, I think I will have truly fucked any chance I ever had at that!
I will try to release sequels as my life goes on, and hope that one day I leave a legacy of books that explain my growth, development, horrors, adventures, and beautiful fucking chaos.
‘Underclass’ is available to order now from Amazon, Waterstones, WHSmith, Blackwells, Kindle, and Audible. If you would like a signed copy, you can get them directly from me. Every pre-order will be signed and personalised by me :)
The "how could someone be so unlucky" narrative infuriates me. Like who do you think abusers are targeting?