In 2002, aged 36, she terminated what she calls "a 23-year love affair" with alcohol. She wrote Cleaning Up as an act of autobiographical purging. The first section describes a lonely childhood in a Leicestershire village, embattled parents and an inability to "fit in". Both at home and at school, she absorbed the message every day that "other people are better". Poor her. But in this, the golden age of the misery memoir, it's a thin story.