In more than 30 years of live broadcasting, I’ve only once sobbed on air. This was the other week, during a radio interview with a professor of psychology called Katriona O’Sullivan. That’s what she is now, a professor at Maynooth University in County Kildare. Before that, she was at Trinity College Dublin, where she also got her PhD. Before that, she was to be found on the access programme through which she got into Trinity. Before that she was living a life of chaos in Dublin, a single mother with next to nothing.

She was in Dublin escaping an even more chaotic life in Birmingham, which had followed a childhood in Coventry, growing up in harrowing, grinding, distressing, miserable, terrifying poverty. No single adjective feels adequate here, so I’ve thrown in as many as I can think of.

She’s better with words than me, as you’ll find if you read her memoir, which is called Poor. I’m buying so many copies of her book to give to people that she may soon have to write one called Rich. I’m on a mission to get everyone in the country to read it.

O’Sullivan and her siblings were parented, if that’s the right word (it isn’t), by two heroin users. She went hungry, for food and for love. Her first real taste of either came at primary school. It was there she came across Ms Arkinson and Miss Hall. If Coventry can manage a statue of Lady Godiva atop a horse, I suggest it should also find a spot for one of Ms Arkinson and Miss Hall.

Ms Arkinson, a teacher, was Irish and knew O’Sullivan’s heritage. “An Irish girl in my class – what a treat.” To have an adult pleased to have her in the room was a new sensation for O’Sullivan. “I loved Ms Arkinson and I knew she loved me,” she writes. “Her eyes said so. The way she helped me said so.”

Miss Hall was the teacher’s assistant who, like Ms Arkinson, like every kid in the school, was aware that poor Katriona smelled. “Pissy pants”, some of her classmates called her. As children often do when they are in crisis, she wet the bed, every night. And she didn’t know how to wash. “There were no towels in our bathroom, barely any toilet paper. Never any soap. None of us owned a toothbrush.” Miss Hall took her to the toilets, locked the door and taught her how to wash. And she gave her clean pants that had the days of the week stamped on them. Words fail me.

In a fairy story, this would have been the moment that things started to get better. Well, they did, but mainly they didn’t. Years of disarray lay ahead, horrific stuff I can’t bear to relate here. And even stuff, she told me, that she couldn’t bring herself to write. What that concerns I dread to think.

She tells an uplifting, if brutal, story so well. It helps that I love her voice, which is a mashup of my two favourite accents: my, erm, own accent, West Midlands, and Dublin. Listening to her, it struck me how much we know about the lives of all manner of ordinary and extraordinary people. Celebrities afford us blow-by-blow accounts of their every move. Athletes, actors, musicians, politicians; you name it. Some of their accounts are better than others, some more honest than others. But we have that insight. Important work is also done by film-makers, endeavouring to show what life looks like in far-flung corners of planet Earth.

This is all to the good, but it’s bizarre that we know more about what it’s like to be Taylor Swift, or Cristiano Ronaldo, or what it’s like to live in Bangladesh or the Amazon basin, than we know about what life is like for millions of people in this country with childhoods like Katriona’s.

Most of us probably have a clearer idea of what it’s like to live on the International Space Station than what it’s like to live in a tower block in the wrong part of Coventry, existing – just existing – as a member of the underclass. Underclass is a ghastly word, I know, which is possibly one reason we don’t like using it. More likely it’s just another excuse to look away and pretend that world doesn’t exist. There’s a good chance you haven’t even read this far.

O’Sullivan’s story, in a turn of events that is nothing less than thrilling, has a happy ending. She landed in Dublin before the 2008 crash, when the Celtic tiger was still alive and kicking. There was money about – money to help people in her world. Help with childcare, treatment for addiction, counselling, access courses to higher education for those whose trajectories were never going to fly them close to any such thing. It all worked out wonderfully in the end. And it’s joyous to join her on that ride.

Then the epilogue, her afterword, is a thump to the solar plexus. It amounts to a stern bollocking from her to you if you happen to be drawing the wrong conclusions from this story. It’s fine to love the rags-to-riches ride – who doesn’t? – but if you’re taking it as proof that, if you just try hard enough, you can do it, you can be anything you want to be, then that, she says in so many words, is balls.

Most people who start out in the world she knew never make it out. She insists she did so only because political decisions were made in a time of relative plenty to fund the kind of social services that were there to help her. Many of those services, in Ireland and the UK, have since been cut.

As for the bit that had me choking up on live radio, it was talking about three words that jumped out of a sentence in her book describing her love, her need, for school dinners. It’s not her reference to the food that got me – it’s how, almost as an aside, she refers to her classmates: “Other kids, the loved ones, they sometimes complained, but I didn’t give a shit what was served. I’d have eaten anything.”

The loved ones. What it must be like to think that everyone but you is loved.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist