The campaigner, whose work on explaining the cost of living crisis helped win the votes of OFM readers, recalls her hectic year
In the middle of 2020, Jack Monroe suffered what she describes as “a proper breakdown”. Lockdown had set in, she’d lost a huge amount of work due to event cancellations and the abuse she was receiving online was becoming too much to bear. “It sent me into the darkest space that I’ve ever been in,” she recalls. (Monroe, who identifies as non-binary, sometimes goes by the pronoun “they” but suggested I use “she” for the purposes of clarity.)
It took a lot of “very intensive” therapy, and going sober, to lift her out again. She also needed to slow down. Over the previous eight years, since her blog post Hunger Hurts hit the headlines, Monroe had established herself not just as a cookbook author but as an influential voice on food poverty in Britain, railing against austerity as well as suggesting affordable ways to survive it. The experience was both exhilarating and exhausting. When I met Monroe in 2018, she estimated she was working 90 hours a week. A few months later she revealed her struggles with alcoholism. Now, after the turmoil of lockdown, which coincided with a difficult break-up, she felt burnt out.
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