recluse

She spent her teenage years looking after her five siblings and working in a chip shop at the weekends while her mother became a recluse.

“He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor,” she writes.

We Americans love our literary losers, and who better to give us the latest version of a recluse with a heart of gold than Walter?

Family members, former school friends and neighbours have told Swedish media he had become a recluse in recent years and may have suffered with psychological issues.

By then, he was living like a recluse in a large derelict home, surrounded by child-sized dolls.