Katriona O'Sullivan

They should ask for something.

They shouldn't ask for things.

It really got me thinking about maybe I could use my story to talk about something else.

Poor is about poverty.

And this is about what we do to people, to women and their bodies and how that drive to succeed, to love and to be smaller can become pathological.

And that's why the word hungry is used.

Exactly.

So...

The book is themed around the things that influenced the way I felt about my body, but also about how hungry I was as a person, hungry for food particularly.

And so it starts when I was really small.

Now it starts in this, like, I loved my body when I was a small kid and I really felt proud of it.

I was great at sport and I didn't even know I was a girl.

But I lived in a home where there was severe neglect.

There was heroin addiction.

We had no food.

And I start my book talking about actually what hunger did to me, physical hunger.

As a child going to school, the loudest noise in my head was my empty belly.

trying to engage in learning, trying to regulate my emotions was affected by that.

I was expected to behave like everybody else, Matt.

And yet I've got this deep hunger inside of me for food, for sustenance, for love as well.