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Mugs
Appears in
By Jack Monroe
Published 2020
As a teenager, I used to hang around in bookshops in my local high street, as a kind of refuge from a house full of fostered children – who I adored, but living in the epicentre of a revolving door of trauma did sometimes take its toll. I disappeared into books – fiction and non-fiction, classics, cookery, poetry, travel – anything I could get my hands on and bury my eyes in.
When I started to earn my own money, at the age of fifteen working in a fish and chip shop, I started to purchase my own books – most of which I no longer have, as poverty forced me to sell every single thing I owned in the summer of 2012, down to almost every book, every mug, every plate, every lampshade – but I have rebuilt my collection from scratch in the years that followed.