The only only reason I gave it four stars was because the structure of the book was at times, just really confusing. The timeline jumps around quite a lot and it gets confusing at what stage in her life Cash is. Writer Cash Carraway’s own experience of life on the breadline, and her avoidance of romanticising homelessness, keep the series firmly in reality (Photo: Simon Ridgway/Sid Gentle Films/HBO) We shouldn’t just need to be on the brink of something to just survive. We should be enjoying life.

People who are able bodied or well enough to work. Those that work but get top ups from Universal credit. I finished this in one day. Cash has a brash, sometimes aggressive writing style that is both compelling and jarring to read. She can certainly get her point across, and it’s an important one at that. She talks of a violent childhood, leading to a violent adulthood and pregnancy. Alone, scared - but excited to finally have somebody to love, and be loved in return. She talks about being ignored and stigmatised throughout her time as a single mother - people just don’t listen to women like her. I knew going in this would be dark at times, bleak and depressing, but I wasn’t expecting it to raise so much anger in me. Anger at these women being overlooked, abandoned when they are at their most vulnerable by a government that doesn’t care. The shame and despair, relying on zero hour jobs and food banks to survive. Living below the poverty line, stealing sanitary towels because you can’t afford them, and thinking of suicide as your only escape from this life. At times it was devastatingly heartbreaking. Cash lämnar mannen och ägnar sin graviditet att jobba ihop 10 000 pund på en peepshow, summan som behövs för att skaffa bostad och vara hemma med barnet. Men när dottern äntligen kommer blir Cash deprimerad och ensam och funderar på att ta sitt liv. Tyvärr blir det inte lättare, det blir värre. Cash Carraway blir som 16 åring utkastad av sin gränslösa och destruktiva mamma. Pappan försvann strax före och skaffar snabbt en ny familj, utan att ta ansvar för dottern. Cash hamnar i destruktiva relationer och när hon är runt 29 blir hon gravid, till sin glädje. Äntligen kan hon få den familjen hon saknar. Den blivande pappa slår sönder ansiktet på henne när han får veta och hotar att se till att hon får ett missfall, om hon inte ordnar en abort själv.Beneath the barrage of gutsy, in-your-face swagger, there is a vulnerability. Cash Carraway’s memoir of her life as a single mother on the margins of austerity Britain is touching and, surprisingly, given its subject matter, very funny too. Wow. All I can say to this book is Wow. It was a real eye-opener; in my job i'm no stranger to working with people who are in the depths of poverty but actually reading this deep and real experience of someone living below the poverty line was quite harrowing. I cannot imagine how Cash had such power to get up every day and carry on living. She was let down by almost everyone in her life; family, friends, loved ones, and professionals who are meant to be there to support you in the worst of times. The darkly funny debut memoir from the creator of HBO and BBC's Rain Dogs, Skint Estate is a scream against austerity that rises full of rage in a landscape of sink estates, police cells, refuges and peepshows. Some people may think that living in Britain has a safety net for ones that find themselves at a disadvantage to others.

This is the memoir of a woman who is not a stain on society. She’s not a shameful secret, stealing money from the government. She’s not lazy, or greedy. She’s a single mother, raising a child in a city she loves, with no support network and a history of domestic abuse. Cash Carraway is just one voice in millions that we never hear. Forgotten and ignored. This is her story, her life - but unfortunately it’s far from unique. 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. After Costello and her daughter, Iris (a nuanced performance from newcomer Fleur Tashjian), are evicted from their flat, the aspiring writer and alcoholic (barely three months sober) scrabbles for work at a peep show, wrangles a room from a stranger by modelling a “nightie” (he says she has a “food bank body… lots of carbs”), breaks into a car, and more. And that’s just in the opener.Daisy May Cooper (This Country) is to star in the show, which is provisionally titled Cash Carraway.

On the beat … police officer Adam Naismith with police dog Wolf. Photograph: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan/Firecrest Films/BBC She is also very funny. “Lots of things about living in a woman’s refuge make me laugh,” she says, which is not the most common response. She isn’t above selling stories about her wretched daily grind of budgeting to a trashy supermarket magazine. Even they found her piece about period poverty to be too strong to print, though at least they paid her for it.Most are given jobs on the minimum wage which offers no add on top ups, rent goes up, utility bills increase and the public spendature is cut. In the end, malnourished from weeks of eating nothing but pasta and with her housing benefit stopped due to an administrative misjudgement, she is evicted from her flat. She has to accept what she has always resisted: being moved out of her beloved London. She has finally been “socially cleansed”: placed in homeless housing in Kent, a place she despises for its racism.

And she is very, very angry about the well-paid newspaper columnists whose intemperate outbursts against the underclass are mirrored here by Carraway’s invective. “We should be banned from all supermarkets except Aldi and Lidl and force-fed a diet of UHT milk and corned beef”, she writes, ‘grub for fallen women… Why didn’t I just shut up and know my place?” There are missteps. What should be a deep dive into Costello’s dark family history is kept blankly surface-level. As brilliant and merciless as Rain Dogs is at skewering poverty voyeurism (“I will not be your liberal victim of the week”), the same point is endlessly replayed until it loses its bite. Still, what a bold, wild-hearted ride, and what a fiercely original performer Cooper is shaping up to be.

The main positive I took is the absolute love Cash so clearly has for her daughter. Together they are a formidable team and have bonded in a way that only their shared life experiences could bring. Also, the chapter surrounding the dilapidated women’s refuge and subsequent (if brief) unification of the women, and their solidarity to bring about change showed a small glimmer of hope on an otherwise desolate landscape. These women need a voice, they need an opportunity to voice it, and I applaud Penguin for giving Cash the stage to do it on. Skint Estate is a carefully crafted memoir with each section satisfactorily wrapped up, for the ending to reflect the beginning of each chapter. It is ranged around themes or locations rather than being chronological, and her college and senior school years are absent. While some episodes are better than others, it is a uniformly strong lineup: never dull, always vivid and never descending into mere agitprop. They all feel like real glimpses into real lives, providing windows on to realities that are too infrequently (and inaccurately) depicted in drama. The underprivileged and disfranchised appear often in documentaries, of course, but rarely escape a framing as zoological specimens. This second mother and child story, of her relationship with her daughter, is the one pure thing in this dirty world, and her fierce love for “Biddy” the principal redeeming quality of Carraway, who would otherwise appear as bitter and cynical.