Katie Edwards didn't become a writer because her story is exceptional, but because its ordinariness is the point. Born into a working-class family in Mexborough, South Yorkshire, she was born into a close-knit, loving family, and spent the first years of her life reading.Ordinary women's stories are systematically quietened by class, respectability and fear. Speaking Up is both a memoir and a statement of intent: Edwards shows how silence is taught, enforced and inherited - and how breaking it is both a personal act and a public service.It is a book about who decides whose voice is worth listening to - and who decides which voices should be heard with compassion and which should be dismissed, ignored, or silenced.