Bare

by Lorna Tucker

The inspirational true story of one woman's fight to survive on the streets of London

I, Lorna Tucker, have lived a life that most you can't even begin to imagine...


I have lived in London's piss-soaked streets, I have lived with the sweet embrace of heroin, I have lived when I should have died.

I have lied, I have thieved, I have stripped, I have tricked, I have loved, I have fallen, I have survived.

I could be your daughter, your mother, your lover - I could be you.

Come to hell and back with me.

AN EYE-OPENING, PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF FEMALE HOMELESSNESS, FROM ONE OF BRITAIN'S MOST EXCITING FILM-MAKERS

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Biography, Memoir, Audiobook

288 pages, Hardcover

Published May 20, 2025

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

To start with I have to say anyone reading this book has to admire the courage of the author for writing it,salute her honesty on every page and truly congratulate her on surviving,turning her life around and I felt really bravely not ending it with flowers and chocolates but in reality,a way better reality it’s true but not a braggy perfect one either (although her accomplishments deserve this )

It is an emotional dark rollercoaster of a ride,there are not’lol’ moments aplenty and the title ‘Bare’ could not be truer,the author really has laid bare her life and what happened to her and the spiralling ‘out of control’ her life took and it IS shocking and more shocking and although am not going to list what she endured every aspect of her life at one point was in ruins….yet the human spirit to survive was also there,nagging and whispering to her at her lowest points,its quite amazing in the depths of the worst scenario the will to change can be there

I cannot imagine what it took to write this book,to give readers like us the opportunity to experience what Lorna went through and goes through,all I can do is thank her for her book and to hope somewhere someone at sometime will read this just when they need it the most

Not a glam read by any means but a hard hitting biography that is impossible to forget and will make you horrified and relieved ( at the end ) at the same time…l

[Donaldinho14 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel bad reviewing this book only giving two stars, because what the author has been through is nothing short of horrendous. However, the narrative is not very well written, is overly episodic and short on self and societal analysis.

I also feel that I need a break from reading worthy but depressing books.

[Caitlin Holloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been looking forward to this one since first hearing about it at the Brazen Proof Party at Cheltenham Literature festival and it didn’t disappoint. Unflinchingly honest, this not only read like the author was trying to be honest with her readers but also to herself. The way that she admitted her past, acknowledged the ongoing struggles with addiction but also memorialised the life she made for herself by accepting help was so incredible.

[Joanne Eglon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another 5 ⭐

Not my usual genre but I loved this honest account of Lorna's addictions.

Eye opening and raw.

Trigger warnings, some of which include: drug addiction, trauma, homelessness.

Written well, writing style just flowed and kept you wanting to read on.

Would recommend 💕

[andshe.reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mick Jagger said it first.. " You have to read this book. "

& like me, you'll be left speechless. The courage and bravery of the author for putting her story on paper for the world to read is like no other. She didn't coat it in rainbows and sprinkles she gave us rawness, brutality, tears, fear, hope, and so much more.

You know what I appreciated most how real this is, no sugarcoating because Lorna shares with us not only what she went through but actually what she continues to live through as an addict. I honestly truly admire her strength.

The title says it all, Bare, Lorna laid bare her life and how it spiralled out of control and how in wanting to protect her mum by leaving almost destroyed not only herself but her mum too. It's not all doom and gloom as there are snippets and yes very brief snippets of hope as a voice whispers to her when she's at her complete worst to hold on, to seek help, to have hope.

By all means, there really isn't much happiness within these pages, but it gives us an honest account of Lornas experiences and an idea of what someone with an addiction faces on a daily basis. Man, I commend you, Lorna & I hope that with all the reviews of your book you see that genuine people like me are so thankful you wrote this.

Thank you to Randomthingstours, Octopus Books, and of course, the author for a copy of the book and Tour opportunity.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bejeezus! Lorna Tucker has been through a lot at such a young age. I’m not naive in the slightest. I accept people chose to leave their family and live on the streets. The stark reality of Tucker’s experience is brutal, it’s dark and quite scary as a parent to read about someone so young going through what Tucker went through.

I think Tucker endured every horrific thing that you’d expect . There’s drugs, alcohol, prostitution, theft, death, lies. You name it, Tucker talks about it in Bare. Much of what she does is out of desperation and necessity to survive, a need to escape or a lack of choice. I get that’s how life is when you life without a roof but Tucker doesn’t hold back on her punches. She makes no allowances for causing people offence. She tells it how it happened for her.

Bare is an eye opening and very uncomfortable read. This wasn’t an easy book to read in the slightest but it is quite an addictive read in a very uncomfortable way. Given Tucker’s current occupation, she is living proof that you can turn your life around and your past doesn’t have to define you.

[Phoebe Gillespie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inhaled in less than a day. A gritty biography literally laid bare. I feel weird rating someone’s life story out of 5, but the simplicity of how it was written and lack of some depth did lose stars for me. However, her story is unforgiving and haunting. One can only imagine the lasting impact living a life like hers from such a young age can have but I was glad to see she has started to find peace.

[Amanda Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in a day!!! Best book I’ve read in a long time. Really well written, honest account of the author’s experience of homelessness & drug addiction from a young age in London. Uplifting & heartbreaking all at the same time, but really eye opening for someone like myself who’s had a pretty privileged & sheltered life. I’m glad I went on this journey to try and understand more 😌

[Helen Temple · Rating 1 out of 5]

This doesn’t take long to read . The author is brave to expose her soul on paper and it’s a heartbreaking read.

[Ciara Fogarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tough gritty read, especially as a Londoner who called the gentrified version of Soho home for 5 years. Beautifully and honestly written. You want to shake the author and scold her while at the same time totally understanding how she’s ended up her. The way she describes addiction is very powerful. Look forward to watching some of her films

[Kelly Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a really good read and it gave a open look into an unpleasant life that many will have gone through. It does contain drug use and there is a couple of brief mentions of s3xual assault but nothing overly graphic.

What stopped this getting 5 stars for me is the ending. It seemed really rushed and like we go on a fast forward through several years of her life and don't get the insight into her recovery and her adult life which was really disappointing as the rest of the book was top notch.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

If, like me, you have ever wondered about homeless women, and how they ended up on the streets, this book will be an eye opener.

Lorna Tucker grew up in Watford. She didn't have terrible parents, although she admits there were bad times. She wasn't hopeless at school.

Her mother had had a difficult life - her father died from alcoholism, and Lorna's grandmother received ECT for depression. At four years old her mother was placed in a children's home with her sister.

Lorna's dad had come from a more settled background with two loving parents who stayed together. However he moved out of the family home when Lorna was four, and lived around the corner with her grandmother. Eventually he remarried and saw less of Lorna and her brother. Lorna's mum tried hard but got in with unsuitable men. She had no reference design on how to be a good mother.

Lorna started drinking at 12. "I soon realised being drunk made everything feel better." At 13 drugs entered her life, and that's when everything changed. "I'd never felt such a neat and potent rush of love, energy and freedom than in that moment. Life was all of a sudden full of colour and feeling."

Colour and feeling was what Lorna was missing in her life, along with luxuries that others had like colour TVs and cars. She was restless; she wanted more from life but didn't know how to get it.

She made friends with people who kept her out all night, and she began missing classes.

From here Lorna's life starts to unravel. She becomes the "girlfriend" of an older man, Danny, and gets involved in burglaries. At 14 she finds herself in a police station cell.

She tries to make a go of her life, getting work at a local hairdresser's, but ends up robbing them. She runs away to London, taking what she can find from her kid sister's money jar.

Lorna gives an unflinching account of how her life becomes an endless search for a drugs fix. She develops life threatening conditions through malnutrition.

She also recounts the strong friendships and loyalty that develop among the homeless of London and how they look out for each other.

[W.S. Luk · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I have lived in Watford. I have lived in Camden. I have lived on many streets, in many pitches deep in the shadows within the stinking and filthy parts of Soho in London…"

(This review previously appeared in LOST ART magazine's newsletter)

There’s a London that many of us have never noticed: a city made up of alleyways and hostels and park benches, its geography full of grime and danger. This is the city that filmmaker Lorna Tucker, known for documentaries about figures like Vivienne Westwood, guides us through in her debut memoir, about her experiences as a homeless, heroin-addicted teenager and single mother.

At an author event, Tucker explained that while she’s campaigned to raise awareness about homelessness via projects such as her 2024 documentary Someone's Daughter, Someone's Son , she was initially hesitant to write BARE, wanting to avoid publishers who’d demand that she handle the subject in stereotypical or inaccurate ways.

This commitment to telling her story on her own terms gives BARE its startlingly intimate edge. Even when describing harrowing sexual and physical violence, explaining what it’s like to take heroin or look for shelter late at night, Tucker’s narration balances its warts-and-all portrait of her younger self with a deep sense of humanity, presenting a street-level portrait of homelessness and addiction.

‘I don’t want to waste my life dreaming of dying,’ Tucker writes. It’s a spirit of hope that animates even the bleakest moments of her life story.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Angi Plant · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thoughts
This is a book that I will not forget in a long time, if ever. There are some harrowing moments that are covered and as it’s nonfiction and about life on the streets, I’d check the blurb before you read.
I think it was written almost in a one step removed way. In essence it’s like writing about another person I assume, as the authors life is so different now.
I felt so deeply for the child that this woman was. Running away because she was living a traumatic life and expecting as so many do, to find the dream in London. Then the reality and dangerous world strike. It shows how one thing leads to another in the murky waters of drugs. It shows how there are good people on the streets and judging the homeless is never a sensible idea. So many of them are there because they either got into something they couldn’t handle, lost someone or something and they didn’t (and don’t) have the background tools to cope. Really read this book. Properly. It’s unflinchingly honest but it’s full of an underlying hope, carries an important series of messages and valuable insights into a world often overlooked and ignored, because it’s not pretty. An interesting and fascinating insight into female life on the streets.
Do read it.
With thanks to Anne Cater, the publisher and the author for the advanced reading copy of this book

[Nadine-Sue Sargent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the blunt and brutal honesty of this. It's a warts and all account of living on the streets, addiction, abuse, survival and a whole lot more as Lorna meanders through life encountering a number of different people living a similar lifestyle. It's raw and makes you consider the people you might wander by and not really see as you go about life. There's a lot of people living out there in hardship for whatever reason and how often are they asked why? How they got there and if they need help?

I think Lorna's account is particularly sad as she was so young when she made her way out into the world with a number of older 'friends' taking advantage. It's not a unique story and children's services hear similar accounts from one LA to the next but the general public don't hear those stories. They don't always see the figures of young women out on the streets, exploited, addicted and very much alone.

I haven't lived this life so can't understand it on that level but I have spent a long time working in children's services and I'd like to think that stories like this should be shared to give honest accounts from people who actually know what it's like and can speak freely with no particular agenda other than to share their truth.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most difficult and upsetting things I’ve read in a long time, but wholly necessary. Lorna unflinchingly captures the nuances and complexities of female homelessness & abuse and does not hold back on the dire life she has had to endure in attempt to comfort the reader. Her honestly is commendable, I can’t imagine how difficult it must’ve been to revisit these places when writing this book. I was lucky enough to meet and hear Lorna speak on her campaign work which was a completely breathtaking experience and talking to her it really hit home that this is a real story and these people were real people, safe to say there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
The book is graphic and just dire, but something I feel everyone should understand so proceed with caution.

[Madeleine Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a rollercoaster of emotions Bare is! Total admiration to the author for her raw honesty. Her memoir tells her story of spiralling out of control s a teenager and ending up homeless in London, addicted to heroin. It is both shocking and hopeful too. Incredible that she survived all that he's been through to become the successful woman and mother she is today. The book is written almost as one long essay that jumps around bit and is chaotic but I felt it mirrored the life he was living then.


"All the emotions that I blocked out as a child come back. It's taken me a long time to learn how to be young"

[Staceywh_17 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wholeheartedly stand with Mick Jagger on this one...everyone needs to read this book!!

It's one woman's account of life and how hers took her down the rabbit hole into a world of darkness and destruction...and how she clawed herself back out to become the woman, wife and mother she is today.

Powerful and emotional, Tucker tells her brutally honest, no holds barred story of life on the streets; her spiral into substance abuse, shoplifting to survive and the 'friends' she made along the way.

A thought provoking must read!

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite an extraordinary story. It is a first hand account of running away at a very young age and ending up on the streets. I read it very quickly - the story is engrossing and tragically sad. We so rarely hear the voices of homeless people and this is such a unique account although you can’t help get the sense that many others follow the same path but never make it out. The book has affected me deeply. It is fast paced but that probably reflects the reality of life on the streets? Time seems to take on a different meaning.

[Sammy-Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s not often that I am lost for words, but this book, and this woman, have left me speechless. What an incredibly brave soul to tell a story as personal and unforgettable as this. Lorna’s resilience, grit, and undoubtable courage must be commended, I only wish this was a work of fiction instead ❤️‍🩹.

[ukbook reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! This is such a powerful read. It shows so well the spiral that can happen to a person’s life - and at such a young age here. I cried numerous times, it really did break my heart over again. The chapters were short and the book under 200 pages. Such an honest and brutal must-read. A 5⭐️ read for me.

[Jade Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an extremely hard read, but that’s a privileged position, I wasn’t the one living the reality. It’s a really important read, and highlights the grim reality of such a marginalised group, everyone should read this book. My heart aches that this is a reality for many people, and I am grateful to Lorna for sharing her journey so openly.

[Hannah W · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was brutal and honest. I really wanted to know more about how Lorna got from being homeless to where she is now though and the last 10% or so felt rushed compared to the detail of the previous chapters. It's a brave and well written book - 5 stars for what it's there, but 2 stars off for the fact it felt like half the story was missing.

[Andrew Francs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully written and kindly shared - a reflection on Lorna’s life experience. Her ongoing journey and incredible courage in sharing her comfort as she dances with her demons and embraces life with a genuine sense of self-awareness.

[Robyn Pickering]

I found Lorna's story harrowing & tragic how a few decisions in your early teens can set you on a trajectory it is difficult to find a way back from. The last 25% of the book became a bit chaotic in timeline for me but nonetheless an engrossing read.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brutal! 4.5⭐️

[Graham Hodgson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific story.. everyone should read it !

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very raw yes, but I think at times some context would have been nice. It's just all presented as fact and as someone with very different life experiences I just found it all a bit hard to follow.

[Absreadingjourney · Rating 4 out of 5]

rave, true and heartbreaking