And then, on 11 October last year, she made an announcement on Twitter. Finally, she was referred to a gender identity clinic. She was suicidal, unable to function and months of psychiatric treatment followed. I just felt quite tied up in knots of despair and awfulness.” That I was always just going to be hounded. I just figured I’d got to a point where I thought that things were never going to get any better. “I just found myself in that dark, dark, dark place. “It was a full-on psychotic, awful, terrible thing,” she says. If it wasn’t quite a Cinderella story, it was nonetheless a triumph of pluck, timing and social media.Īnd then, she had a breakdown.
Monroe blogged, tweeted, Facebooked and Instagrammed herself into a successful career as a cook and poverty campaigner and by spring last year she had published two successful cookery books and was engaged to the chef and restaurateur Allegra McEvedy, the co-founder of the Leon chain, and was living with her and their two children in McEvedy’s west London home.
I’d got to a point where I thought that things were never going to get better The New York Times did a major profile on her as “Britain’s austerity celebrity” and the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn lampooned her 42p kale pesto pasta and described her experience on benefits as “a lifestyle choice”. Her tales of food-bank Britain caught something of the spirit of the times, a make-do-and-mend heroine for the cut-the-deficit George Osborne years.
