Poor: Grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief

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More impactful was the heart and hurt in Katriona’s story, and the power of education to help heal those who have been failed most by society. O’Sullivan, grew up one of five children in England with Irish parents, both heroin addicts, in a home environment riven with dysfunction, abuse and poverty. The friend, also a young single mother, told O’Sullivan how she was studying law in Trinity College. She now works as a senior lecturer in Digital Skills in Maynooth University's Department of Psychology.

I was hungry for food, but also love, care and nourishment”, she says reflecting on her early years. During her schooldays there had been teachers who looked out for her – beacons of stability in a chaotic childhood. Middle of the road good from middle class families will thrive and survive, but in the TAP they only push the boat out for the super-dupers.She loved her parents, she says, and when they weren’t addicted to drugs or alcohol, they could be wonderful. Under any circumstances, Katriona is someone to look up to and admire for her intellectual prowess, academic achievements and her work in ensuring equal access to education for young Irish girls, but when you read about the absolute dire poverty in which she grew up, she is all the more remarkable. It should be read by everyone - because there's not one person on this planet who hasn't hit rock bottom at one point in their lives.

When she was five or six, she discovered her father, who had overdosed, unconscious, a syringe still stuck in his flesh.

It is almost an accident that her life took this trajectory – it has not been the same for her siblings – and even though her climb brought her to a place that is preferable to where she was, it comes with sacrifices. As you follow the story beyond O’Sullivan’s early years, she keeps doing big things: overcoming big hurdles and traumas, achieving huge dreams, and creating changes and challenges to the status quo. I feel like the book was a bit rushed once she dedicated herself again to her Trinity degree and I would have just liked to have known more about this time of her life as well.

Corrections in Ink by Keri Blackinger is another triumphant story of a woman’s will to live and to flourish. Poor is the extraordinary story – moving, funny, brave, and sometimes startling – of how Katriona turned her life around. O’Sullivan has dedicated her life’s work to changing society for other women like her, but she has rightly dedicated this memoir to herself. But choice is a myth that’s perpetuated by the middle classes – only a few people really can choose. How much courage, strength, fortitude and pure determination must it have taken to get where she is today?It is astounding to contemplate how Katriona managed to survive the life she was given, and through her own endeavours and with the assistance of a robust support system (which she had to navigate as well), emerged as a highly accomplished and compassionate academic.

The healthcare workers who roughly handled her unconscious father or told her drug-addicted mother, who had just given birth on the bathroom floor, that she shouldn’t be allowed to have children; the police who raided the house and treated the children not as victims, but as “vermin”; the social services who sent the children back home to be abused and neglected. Poor is the moving, inspirational and brave story of a seven year old girl who needed love and care and found it with her teachers. What was funny, but also difficult, says O’Sullivan now, “was that I was struggling at that time with: ‘Who am I? I cried when I read about her older brother coming home from work to find her and her siblings, hungry, with not a parent to be seen. Poor is this story, the story of how a once-bright student found herself on the wrong path and how, through sheer grit, determination and bravery, turned her life around thanks to an unexpected encounter with the Trinity Access Programme as an adult.

Instead, there is an array of moments when decisions were made out of necessity or survival, and beneath that, survival was a deep love and connection between O’Sullivan and her parents. At 15, O’Sullivan had left school and was pregnant and homeless; later, she struggled with addiction. In her newly published memoir ‘Poor’ she explains how along the way some teachers tried to help the bright student. Katriona O’Sullivan’s memoir reminds me of “Kintsugi” – the Japanese art of repairing something broken using precious metal.