That said, Lowborn is never mawkish or oversentimental, it doesn’t milk Hudson’s experience. To accompany Hudson as she revisits the towns and estates where she grew up and experience her sense memory along with her, drawing out things she had forgotten and buried, is powerful and at times distressing to anyone with a decent sense of empathy. There is already something very disembowelling about interrogating ones past experiences but it’s another thing altogether to return to the areas where those experiences took place and deal with the resultant tremors, and this is where the strength of this book lies. Hudson’s book takes us through her childhood, her years spent ricocheting back and forth between Scotland and England, experiencing life in care, neglect and assault, periodically bringing us back into the present day, where she sifts through it all. Anthologies of working-class writing, like Dead Ink Books’ Know Your Place and the recent Kit de Waal-edited Common People recognising the validity of these stories and Lowborn feels like an important part of that upsurge. In the publishing world, at least from a grassroots level, there has been a recent upsurge of interest in working-class narratives.
So, there’s something quite wonderful about this memoir, which speaks of the real challenges faced by some of the poorest people in society, emerg ing just as Kyle’s empire is crumbl ing. For some, the programme became a true representation of Britain’s working classes. In a show that made its name by fetishizing and dehumanizing the working classes, Kyle pitted some of the most vulnerable people in society against one another without taking responsibility for the lives he was exploiting. The timing of the release of Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn couldn’t have been better, hitting the shelves just days after the cancellation of The Jeremy Kyle Show.
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