Blog tour: Bare by Lorna Tucker
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘I, Lorna Tucker, have lived a life that most you can’t even begin to imagine…
‘I have lived on London’s wet, piss-soaked streets. I have lived with the warm, sweet embrace of heroin. I have lived in hostels with my newborn baby. I have lived so much that I barely made it out alive.
‘I have lied, thieved and stripped. I have tricked you into giving me money. And you’ve wished I didn’t exist. You’ve looked away; you’ve been disgusted. I could be your daughter, your lover… you – all of us are closer to the brink than we’d like to think.
‘I didn’t die though. I lived… And it’s time to tell my story.
‘Come to hell and back with me.’
In Bare, filmmaker Lorna Tucker recounts the period of her teens she spent living on the streets of central London as a drug addict in the late 1990s, explains how she reached that point, and summarises the ups and downs of her life since a near-death experience and reconciliation with her family put her on the bumpy road to recovery.
This book is not only an insight into Tucker’s own descent and the reasons for it, but the lives of some of the other unhoused people she met on the streets and in hostels, and how their dependencies drove them to desperate lengths and impacted those around them.
Bare is the perfect title for this memoir, as Tucker lays down the facts of her past in such a plain, straightforward way. She doesn’t embellish, and doesn’t need to: her unflinching, often shocking narrative of life on the brink – refusing to swerve or skate over the worst things she did – is more than effective enough to stand on its own.
In fact, this is a book that’s full of truth bombs, not only about Tucker’s experiences as an individual, but homelessness and addiction more generally. For example, she writes about how people on the street team up and look out for one another as nobody else will, yet even the friendliest of allies can turn nasty when they’re dying for a fix.
By writing about other people she knew while sleeping rough, Tucker both highlights the centrality of community to getting through life on the streets (even if some connections end up hindering more than helping) and tacitly acknowledges her relative luck and privilege: unlike so many unhoused people, she didn’t die or disappear, and had a loving family who wanted her back.
Accordingly, Tucker’s encounters with children who weren’t as well cared-for as herself and her siblings particularly shocked and stuck with her. She gives heartbreaking accounts of a toddler who has a roof over his head but is totally neglected; a tiny baby who’s brought to a gathering in a park where people drink and get high; and a young boy who’s being raised by his great-grandmother as his mother’s so far gone, she doesn’t even tell her friends she has a son, and steals money that would otherwise go towards his upkeep.
Tucker additionally stresses that it was her own low self-esteem (largely stemming from adverse experiences with people from outside of her family) that led to her going off the rails and getting into trouble with the law, and her own sense of shame that prompted her to run away and prevented her from going home. She also emphasises how recovery never really ends: it just takes a bad day at work or a “just one won’t hurt” to rekindle an addiction, and she’s relapsed a few times since she came off the streets.
Her story therefore has qualities of humanity and empathy that are sometimes missing from recovery narratives – instead of ‘I kicked the habit, never looked back, and became successful, therefore anyone else can as well’, her message is ‘coming off drugs is incredibly difficult, even when you really want to, and have support from people who love you’. I’d have liked to have found out a bit more about her journey to becoming a filmmaker, but then, that’s incidental to the main point of the book.
Bare is harrowing and sad, but also refreshingly human.
