THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME
Janice Galloway
Granta, £16.99 'WRITING," a teacher told an impressionable, needy young Janice Galloway, "was not about me, me, me". Thankfully, she scorns that wisdom to squeeze out the sponge of her
silent childhood to wonderful, addictive effect. Hugging the discovery that "books made solitude into intimate company", she takes her loneliness and guilt, and transforms it into An Audience With Janice Galloway, as contemplative as it is funny, as talented as it appears to disbelieve the worth of its telling.
Her parents, Beth and Eddie, were not a heavenly match. A louche no-good bus driver and a stunning, stoic clippie with the best legs in Saltcoats produce several miscarriages and a daughter Cora. Force of nature Cora is already out of the picture and "settled", a word turned over as satisfactorily as a boiled sweet, in Glasgow when Janice, mistaken for the menopause, first announces her presence in the kitchen mere hours before labour.
Long-suffering Beth leaves alcoholic Eddie, and mother and toddler embark to a single room above a doctor's surgery, a poky sloping cave just big enough for two, when Cora returns, with one suitcase, plenty of attitude and a string of willing men.
There is a defensive pride throughout, a bravado of unity despite what was a fragmented, isolated time. The pain occasioned by being told "I wish I'd never had you" manifests itself with beautiful and hideous tangibility as a "sensation of stuckness. Like swallowing a mountain".
The shared yet disjointed resilience of a trio who lived by the rule of "Things can always get worse. We're not dead yet" yields splendid irony and bathos: "The day I acquired a piano, what stole all the thunder was teething gel, the inevitability of dental disease and a rope of dead hair", while the pathos of looking back upon the introspective child she was is a rich seam to be mined.
Distracting herself with books and music, dizzied by the idea that "you could learn how to save your life", she was, necessarily, old before her years, empathising always with the underdog.
On reluctantly closing the boards of this unforgettable memoir, the words "first volume" are strangely comforting – a combination of Galloway's power and the fact that the wee girl done good make it so.
The full article contains 392 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
