In her newly published memoir ‘Poor’ she explains how along the way some teachers tried to help the bright student. However by 15 O’Sullivan was pregnant and homeless. The young mother struggled with substance abuse, repeating the debilitating patterns of her own childhood. She moved to Dublin aged 20 after her parents left England. Clearly, O’Sullivan didn’t want a world where she would be the only one that found solid ground. We see this in her efforts to place her experience within her parents’ experiences and her parents’ experiences within their histories. O’Sullivan expertly gives us an insight into the genuine harm of her parents’ addictions but by no means defines them by it. She beautifully and lovingly tells the story of two whole people. Two people who struggled and fought, who lived a life shrouded in pain and poverty, but also in song, loyalty and books. O’Sullivan went on to achieve a first class honours degree in psychology and now works in Maynooth University breaking down barriers to education for marginalised girls.

I so wanted her to be one of us, the working class, and I felt it in my gut that she was. I deeply longed to see myself in the structures surrounding me and felt she was a bit of me. I loved meeting smart, successful women who were very grounded in working-class culture and identity, and I knew I was in the presence of someone I could learn from.Having somebody like me in there was just pivotal”, she explains. “If you don’t see people like you, you’re never going to aspire to it”. Katriona speaks about the people in education and social care setting who helped her, and those who failed her. I cried when reading about her early childhood and the abuse she suffered. 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. Some chapters are truly harrowing. I found myself with a pain in my chest and thinking of that little seven year old and her brothers and sister long after I'd finished reading. Possibly biased as I'm one of Katriona's ex-students circa 2012. I always remember how honest she was with us all about her experience of the Trinity Access Program etc., and I was always in awe of her. An absolute powerhouse of a woman. I never knew just how much she had been through until I read this book - and now my respect for her has just soared to levels I didn't even think possible. Katriona really built herself from the ground up. Being poor effects everything you do and everything you are. Thinking of poverty, we picture barefoot children in rags on the street but for me poor was also a feeling like I had no worth. It was poverty of mind, poverty of stimulation, poverty of safety and poverty of relationships. Being poor controls how you see yourself, how you trust and speak, how you see the world and how you dream" or

It takes a special person to see beyond the wrongs that one has endured and then use one’s wounds as the basis to create something big. 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 think O’Sullivan would have made it anyway, but you can’t ignore the moments along the way that helped.Poor is the extraordinary story – moving, funny, brave, and sometimes startling – of how Katriona turned her life around. During her schooldays there had been teachers who looked out for her – beacons of stability in a chaotic childhood. They planted seeds of self-belief. In Dublin when she sought help, she found mentors whose encouragement revived that self-belief. She got her act together, got a flat and a job as a cleaner, and got into Trinity College. Today Dr Katriona O’Sullivan is an award-winning lecturer whose work explores barriers to education. Full of insight into a live lived right up against the boundaries placed on it by poverty ... so important ... we'd highly recommend' - Fi Glover, Times Radio One of the most important books I have ever read ... a beautiful telling of determination despite the odds' - Lynn Ruane, Irish Times

At it’s core this is a cautionary tale about the effects of austerity, the class system in the UK and the horrifying generational impact of addiction. What makes this story so awe-inspiring is how she went from this to becoming Dr Katriona O’Sullivan, the award-winning lecturer after graduating from Trinity College. How much courage, strength, fortitude and pure determination must it have taken to get where she is today? The book helped. She likes herself now. “I think I’ve always liked myself, though. What’s really sad about growing up is that I can clearly remember being a young girl, alive to the world, inquisitive and bright, like all kids are but, unfortunately, I was born in this community where I wasn’t given an opportunity to flourish.” She feels now, nearly four decades on, closer to that girl, before the weight of neglect, predatory men, fear and low expectations crushed her. “Like, I’m alive again.”An important contribution to our understanding of poverty and its impact' - Sinéad Gibney, Business Post Katriona O’Sullivan: ‘I sat drinking in the knowledge, and for the first time in my life I felt alive’ ] The next couple of years were difficult, dealing not only with the trauma of her own childhood, but also with a baby. We normalise the struggle of life with a newborn for older, middle-class mothers, she points out, “but young mothers are punished for the same thing”. To her horror, O’Sullivan found the pattern of her childhood repeating itself: it was easy to forget the trauma of her life if she was out at pubs and clubs, drinking and taking drugs; desperate for love, she confused it with sex.