Janice Galloway (2008) This is not about me.

The problem with autobiographical books is the writer appears before the procurator fiscal of memory and cheerfully admits to everything. Oh, that was me. Oh, that was me too. Yep, I was guilty of that. Convenient fictions become facts. Galloway uses old photos to ground her memories. She grew up in postwar Saltcoats a seaside town popular with holidaymakers in 1950s Scotland. Her mother thought it was the menopause, but it was Janice. Her father drove a bus and went to the pub. That was his routine. Janice, a precocious child, quickly picked up lots of things smashed and fell when her dad was about, including her mother. There was only one option then, you got on with it. When her mum was locked outside their council house with Janet and her Dad inside ignoring her pleas to let her in, she was finally forced to leave. Cora, her elder sister, twenty year’s older,  had already made her exit. Pregnant and married and living in far off Glasgow. That didn’t last. She didn’t get on with it. Cora left her husband and baby son because she said he went out without leaving her a fag to smoke. Cora refused to be anybody but Cora. When she turned up with her suitcase Janice and her mother were living in a garret, eking out an existence above a medical practice in which she worked for the snobby doctors. Janet shared a bed with her mother until she was sixteen. When you make your bed you lie in it. And this pull out bed filled the only room. But Cora not only squeezed in, she flourished and brought glamour, colour  and a flickering black and white telly to their grey lives. She didn’t want a boyfriend. She wanted boyfriends plural. If that inconvenienced others and her mother that was too bad. Janice was the kind of snot-nosed  inconvenience that she skelped and terrorised to teach her a lesson and for her own good. The lesson wasn’t to be learned as school, where Janice thrived, but in her understanding of how life worked. When she got older she’d find boys and her brain would turn to mush. Cora was a living example of that and before that her mother dressed in a conductress outfit and looking ready to take on the world. What drives the story is the fierce love between mother and daughters.  But what underscores it is despair. Janice feeds into the despair, knows she is not wanted, but so much wants to be, and for her mum to love her that she is determined to be the perfect child that deserves that love.

Hitting puberty in the early 1960s: ‘She knows her name is Janice, that nobody chose it. She knows some people die and some make mistakes and there’s no changing it, no appeal. She knows that she’s a sensitive plant with a memory like a packet of razor blades, but it’s not hers either. You get what you get and that’s your hand, the same for everyone. It’s fixed.’

I know books and authors as good as this come only once in a lifetime. It is a blessing to read this book. Facts can become fiction, but I’d be telling a lie if I wasn’t jealous of such beauty.