A Memoir of Working-Class British Upbringing

The escape from working-class life has good narrative pedigree, a classic form—beginning with the idea of escape itself. It’s something like a sharpened bildungsroman. The child is nudged forward by an ambitious parent, by an influential teacher, or simply by a curiosity that, like water, insists on finding its way in and out. There’s the Cortés-like discovery of world-disclosing books; the opening up at school or university; perhaps a gradual estrangement from those same ambitious parents, who discover, too late, that they’ve been underwriting the family’s own unravelling. And then there’s the journey away from the old home, toward actual new worlds.