Kathy Sheridan

There was such love there.

With one particular brother, your relationship with him was so touching.

Yes.

I'm very sad to hear that because I thought that relationship was so lovely.

It was part of what made that first book, it gave it one of the lights.

Yeah.

Moving on to Hungary, your second book, Catriona.

I felt you'd said all you had to say, basically, in Poor, was the first one.

What did you set out to do with Hungary?

And your story is mapped on to the story of your body and the hunger is mapped on to what happened to you, Katrina, from the time you were very small.

I mean, you were raped at the age of seven and you describe that in the book.

That resulted in you storing the sugar sandwiches in the boiler cupboard, gorging on that.

Obviously, that was hunger, but it was also several kinds of hunger.

You say that by the age of eight, you'd been abused by three different men and boys.

And then as you grew older, you and I remember this era, you were still going on, but maybe not so obviously groped and stared at by older, sleazy men.

I remember one line of the book where you say, imagine if a 12 year old boy at the school gates had a mother tell him how well he filled out his trousers.

I know.

I thought there was a great reverse image of what was happening to you.

And you were getting a lot of this at this very, very vulnerable adolescent time.

And I thought that was interesting point you made about your own family.