Jess Phillips MP was an accidentally young mother, wears “big hoop earrings that I buy in pound shops”, and her brother is a recovering heroin addict. When her own children were small she lived on benefits for a while, and she remains a stranger to the art of staying on-message. Tell me again how politicians are a gilded, out-of-touch elite.

Nonetheless, the book she has written about that life and its relationship to her Labour politics will inevitably irritate some. Many of them will be men who won’t actually need to read it to know they hate its unapologetically feminist take on everything from trolling to hands-on fatherhood. Those who prefer feminist thinking dressed up as academic analysis and policy proposals, meanwhile, won’t warm to it and nor will anyone for whom the words “kick-ass woman” grate.

But Phillips isn’t writing for them. She’s gunning for a broader audience, for something much trickier to pull off; and while she’s doing so in a voice that is far from literary, don’t be fooled. There is a proper writer’s eye in here somewhere, catching the exact unsettling emotion and pinning it to the wall.

Describing various grim but not unusual narrow escapes she and her friends had while growing up – the girl who fought her way out of what they wouldn’t back then have called attempted rape, the girl whose older boyfriend offered to sell her to another man for drugs – she writes crisply: “Today I call this sexual exploitation. Back then I swooned over the idea that these edgy men found us so desirable.” All the ambiguity and confusion of being a teenage girl, aware of some sexual power over men but not of how terribly easily it can be used against you, comes rushing back. She doesn’t labour the parallel with vulnerable girls and grooming gangs, but she hardly needs to.

Phillips worked for Women’s Aid before being elected Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley and has made her name campaigning on issues of domestic and sexual violence. Such a name, in fact, that you forget she’s only been in parliament since 2015 and only joined the charity, initially as a PA, in 2009. In seven years, she went from answering phones in Sandwell to addressing a UN congress on violence against women. That is hardly the trajectory of an everywoman, but it does help explain why she got a book deal at 35 when most MPs must wait until they’ve retired from cabinet. She’s a fast learner and this is an attempt to pass on lessons learnt.

She stood for parliament, she says, out of despair at the candidates on offer locally and anger at the Tories, but mainly because she honestly didn’t see why she couldn’t. At times it was terrifying – election campaigns cost thousands of pounds that she didn’t have to lose – but then “we’re trained as women to regret our decisions”. There’s always a reason not to, but plenty of men manage to ignore it, so why not her?

True, there’s little in her advice to young women that hasn’t been said somewhere before, from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman. Say yes to things, even if you don’t feel up to it; don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good; don’t let culture fill with male voices at the expense of your own.

Phillips is funny enough to give the message a fresh twist, however, and she illustrates it with stories – such as the reason she had a baby at 23, having got pregnant only a month into her relationship with her then boyfriend (now husband) – rarely heard from women in public life. Even better, she grasps the new urgency of telling such stories in an age where crude populism feeds on the belief that conventional politicians all belong to one faceless, homogenous, self-serving elite.

But what really makes the book stand out is her knack of producing something arresting from what looks like nothing. “When I drive past an overweight woman going for a jog,” she writes towards the end of the book, “I have to stop myself from rolling down the window and whooping at her public efforts.

“That woman looks strong and powerful to me. That woman screams ‘I don’t give a toss if I don’t look like Jessica Ennis, I’m doing this for me.’” But naturally, when she complains of being unfit and her husband suggests running, she says she can’t because people would laugh.

And really the whole book is there, in one brief vignette; ideas of female solidarity, body confidence, shame, defiance and the wry acceptance that it’s easier to preach to other people than to live by your own philosophy. She clearly wants readers to take away the idea that if she can do this, then God knows anyone can, which is a generously empowering message. But one can’t help concluding that Jess Phillips is more exceptional than she makes herself look.

• Everywoman by Jess Phillips is published by Hutchinson (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99