Working-Class Women Aren't Supposed To Say This

‘What I’ve made is good. What I’ve made is important.’

It’s rare and radical to say that out loud. Especially if you’re working class. Especially if you’re a woman.

Because when you’re working class and a woman, you’re not supposed to say you’ve made something great. You’re supposed to be grateful. Quiet. You’re supposed to wait for someone else to say it for you, to decide you’re worth noticing, then hand you their approval like a gift.

We also don’t talk enough about tall poppy syndrome. The idea that standing out, claiming space, or saying good things about yourself and your work makes you arrogant, too big for your boots, 'thinks she's better than us'. We're told (in loud ways and quiet ways) that ambition is unattractive. That pride is a flaw.

But playing small doesn’t protect you. It just keeps the spotlight on the same people, the same stories.

I know what I’ve made. And I’m saying it.

My book is good. My book is important. And here's why…

Drystone - A Life Rebuilt pushes back against expectation — not just in content, but in form, tone, and intent.

Firstly, it’s not a tell-all. I made deliberate choices about what to include, and what to leave unsaid. Not because there was nothing else to say, but because some things are mine to keep. Life exists beyond the book, a life hard fought, and hard won. This is a memoir shaped by boundaries.

But that restraint is not a weakness, it’s part of the book’s strength.

There are moments of confession, but they earn their place. The writing never tries to garner pity, sell pain, or manufacture depth. Instead, it offers something just as urgent: an honest record of learning to choose, where you can, something better. Of building a life inside systems designed to diminish it. Of refusing to carry what no longer belongs. Of living, at last, in your own rhythm, in your own way.

It moves through themes of racism, generational trauma, sexual violence, addiction, ADHD, class, motherhood, and family with clarity and control.

I'm careful with pain. I write about trauma without spectacle. My writing never exploits personal experience for effect, and it doesn’t frame survival as something to be consumed. Instead, it holds those moments with care, making space for what’s hard without asking the reader to gawk, or the writer to bleed.

It trusts the reader. It never over-explains. I don't walk you through what to think or feel.

Despite its title, Drystone - A Life Rebuilt is not a book about drystone walling.

The sections where I write about the craft are evocative, engaging, and technically confident but they’re not the focus.

Walling becomes a way to think about structure, effort, repetition, and the body. A mirror for the larger story, how we build, rebuild, and what it means to create something lasting by hand.

And drystone walling doesn’t fully arrive in the book until Chapter 4. That delay is deliberate. The groundwork of the previous chapters is emotional. By the time the stones appear, the reader knows the stakes. They’ve been watching someone figure it out, one stone at a time.

But walling isn’t only a metaphor. I really build walls.

My hands get all kinds of dirty. I trap my fingers. My muscles ache. My back twinges. My ego too. And the structure of the book mirrors the act of walling itself: built piece by piece, section by section, always deliberate. It invites the reader to sit with discomfort, to notice what’s been placed where, and why.

Drystone - A Life Rebuilt also challenges the conventions of nature writing.

Its language is clean and deliberate, with any moments of lyrical force rooted in experience. This is nature writing that’s lived-in. And it’s written from a mixed-race, working-class, neurodivergent, and female perspective. A combination still rare in publishing, especially in memoir and nature writing.

Perspectives like this are often marginalised, flattened, or turned into spectacle. They’re rarely allowed to exist on their own terms, complex, contradictory. This book doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t perform identity for the page. These parts of who I am are not just context, they shape the way I write, the what, and the why. That matters.

Working-class stories are often either sensationalised or erased. If you’re not writing tragedy or bootstraps redemption, the industry doesn’t quite know where to shelve you. This book isn't about overcoming hardship to reach comfort, it’s about shaping a life in the midst of it. That’s not a narrative we see often but it’s one that’s real, and necessary.

Memoir still too often centres voices with access to stability, to safety, to time. And nature writing still too often speaks from a place of quiet leisure and detachment. Drystone - A Life Rebuilt offers something different. It brings you inside the labour. It quietly expands the conversation around race, class, resilience, and embodiment and it does so with care and craft.

The book doesn’t posture, it knows. It is built from lived experience, not theory. It speaks with authority because it’s earned, not in credentials, but in graft. You feel the weight of that on every page: not performance, not borrowed language, but the clarity of someone who knows what they’re talking about, because they’ve lived it.

It’s also a great read. Drystone - A Life Rebuilt is carefully made, but never overwrought. Its accessible prose and dry humour make it easy to read, even when the subject matter is hard. It has depth without density, weight without drag. That balance matters. And from what I have heard, it’s what keeps people turning the page.

I don’t need to wait for someone else to name it. I won’t pretend I don’t know what I’ve made.

If it’s good, I will say so.

And I have.

You should too.