“The wall is about not knowing what is out there, or believing that what is out there is either entirely irrelevant to your life, or so complicated that it would go right over your head if you made an attempt to understand it.”

I’ve been so inspired by this stand-out autobiographical essay in Hanley’s first book. It’s a vivid, moving, personal story of class and the barriers facing a council-estate child when meeting the world beyond. She writes so brilliantly about Chelmsley Wood, the Midlands housing estate of her youth, and the opportunities and limitations such a place afforded her. After reading it, the idea of the wall in the head haunted me for years, so similar were our backgrounds, but here was someone with a much sharper and more politically focussed mind explaining the effects of those circumstances back to me in ways I had not fully understood. But beyond that that, those personal moments she shares – in relationships or education – have a vertiginous quality, making the reader feel like they’re falling back into a half-remembered youthful world of malleability and uncertainty.

First published in Estates: An Intimate History, Granta, 2007