Single mum's £20-a-week struggle is a blogbuster
Move over, Bridget Jones. The next best-selling diary is being penned by a single mum who lives on discounted food and gets by on £20 a week.
Until now, Maria Roberts's hilarious and moving account Single Mother On The Verge has been an anonymous online blog.
But now the journal - full of tales of scraping together the pennies for the weekly shopping and amusing anecdotes about her nine-year-old son Jack - has won her a five-figure book deal with Penguin.
Pitched as "Jane Eyre meets Shameless", the 29-year-old's accounts of life as a single mum on a Manchester council estate are set to prove a hit with women everywhere.
Maria's life is filled with interesting characters like her eco-warrior boyfriend Idris, Jack's father Damien - "a bit of a nutter" - her "biological parents" plus stepmother Eleanor and stepfather Rufus, and neighbours Kylie and Jason.
She works as a freelance writer, and her constant worries about money force her to be thrifty. She likes to go to the supermarket at 7.48pm "just before they pull the shutters down and when the food is discounted to the point of giving it away".
She adds: "True, you have to roll into the foyer like James Bond and run like an athlete down the aisles. A little embarrassing, yes, but very exhilarating.
"Example: I once bought a joint of beef for the bargain price of 10p. Saving? £7.63. Now you can't get better than that."
But cheap cuts may be a thing of the past once her blog has hit the shops.
"I'm incredibly excited," she says. "I hope the book will shed some light on the lives of those women who don't have weighty bank balances like the yummy mummies but are yummy all the same - even if they do shop at Aldi not Waitrose."
It's not all funny observations though. She also hints at a dark periods in her past.
On Wednesday, August 8, she refers to "the other side of domestic violence than the nasty cuts and wounds. The comedy side (trust me, there almost is one) and the side where women just get on with it."
When she was 22, Maria moved into a women's refuge with her 18-month-old son.
"All I had with me were a couple of bags," she says. But incredibly she stuck with her degree in English Literature and Spanish at Manchester University and even wrote a play about domestic violence which she took to this summer's Edinburgh Festival.
"The thing about being a mum is day-today it can be a pain..." she wrote of that experience. "But not doing it is dull. All I do is hang out in bars. Which is very boring."
Then there's the (almost) comedy side of domestic violence
Mirror
