Susan Boyle has revealed her Irish mother's incredible love for her and her doctor's assessment that she would never amout to much after her complicated birth.

Details of her early life are revealed in the DailyMail extract from her book which is available today.

Writing about her mother she says:

"Having given birth to eight children over 23 years, she had been advised not to have any more. The doctors considered the danger so severe they offered a termination but that would have been unthinkable for my mother, a devout Catholic.
During my birth in 1961 it was touch and go for her as well as me but, eventually, I was delivered by emergency caesarean section. When my mother came round from the anaesthetic, the doctor looked at her seriously.
‘You have a girl,’ he told her. ‘She’s very small and she needs help with her respiration, so we have her in an incubator.’
When my father Patrick appeared at my mother’s bedside, she knew something was wrong. ‘She was starved of oxygen for a wee while,’ he said. My mother was an intelligent woman and knew what that meant.
It was a few weeks before my parents were allowed to take me home. The doctors said it was likely that I had suffered slight brain damage.

‘It’s probably best to accept Susan will never be anything,’ my parents were told. ‘Susan will never come to anything so don’t expect too much of her.’

I’m sure the doctors had the best intentions but they shouldn’t have said that. What they didn’t know was that I’m a fighter and I’ve been trying all my life to prove them wrong.

We lived in Blackburn, a small town outside Edinburgh. My father was a miner and later worked at British Leyland. When my mother became pregnant with me, the family needed more room and this is how we came to move to a pebble-dashed council semi in Yule Terrace.

There is a photograph of my mother holding me, taken when I was about six months old. I am still small for my age. My mother has both hands firmly clasped around me. For me, the photograph sums up our relationship.

My mother guided me and I relied on her – she was the lodestone of my life."