Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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It’s precisely this talent that makes it extra depressing to realise she’s wasted her platform writing such an angry, hate-filled little dirge. 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. As the episodes unfold, Costello and Iris end up skidding and reeling through various scenarios (entering a women’s refuge; cos-playing yummy mummydom; socially cleansed from London). Though their voices are very different, in some ways each woman’s journey to writing her book – their hoped-for route out of the situations they describe – is comparable. But to blame everything on governmental policy and to take no responsibility for her own choice is a lazy, reductive stance that Cash seems to enjoy taking and even finds pride in.

She isn’t above selling stories about her wretched daily grind of budgeting to a trashy supermarket magazine.Her story begins in 2010 when she found herself pregnant and alone in a women’s refuge shouting at David Cameron on the TV talking about fairness. Both had challenging teenage years; both went to university; both took too many drugs and had disastrous relationships; both imagined they lived in a country with adequate safety nets for those prepared to work, and discovered in the decade of austerity and the benefits cap that they did not. Alone, pregnant and living in a women's refuge, Cash Carraway couldn't vote in the 2010 general election that ushered austerity into Britain.

She’s fought against a system that seems to despise the poor and the disabled and for that I can only praise her for.Jad Adams, right, is a historian, journalist and TV producer who is the chair of Croydon Nightwatch, the local homelessness charity. The reality of food banks, the conditions of sex work, the impact of politics on families in poverty, the issue of racism in council housing and how poverty impacts mental health are just some mentions. This book addresses wealth privilege and leaves out no detail about the reality of balancing motherhood and poverty. Inspired by Skint Estate, the drama is described as “a wild and punky tale of being trapped below the poverty line and doing everything it takes to escape. 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.