Items related to The Trick Is To Keep Breathing
From the corner of a darkened room Joy Stone watches herself. As memories of the deaths of her lover and mother surface unbidden, life for Joy narrows – to negotiating each day, each encounter, each second; to finding the trick to keep living. Told with shattering clarity and wry wit, this is a Scottish classic fit for our time.
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Review:
Janice Galloway's The Trick Is to Keep Breathing opens with a woman watching herself from the corner of a darkened room. Immediately, Janice Galloway sweeps us inside her heroine's confused psychology. Alone in her flat, the woman (ironically named "Joy") sits quietly in the dark, nervously checking the clock, jumping at the shrill ring of the telephone. We learn through a series of flashbacks that the twin deaths of her married lover and her mother have brought her to this state of intense neurosis: "I don't feel as if I'm really here at all". Fragmented sentences and an irregular typography help to capture her deepening sense of dislocation and bewilderment.
Review:
With such a depressing subject matter at hand, it would be easy for Galloway's prose to become irritatingly introverted. With her sharp wit, however, Galloway skilfully prevents her narrative from sliding into egotism and self-pity. There is a host of minor characters to provide comic relief--the overweight, awkward health visitor; the pompous, irascible doctor; the man from the bookies who is desperate to seduce her; and the ever-mad Ros, another patient on the psychiatric ward where Joy inevitably ends up.
Galloway is writing in a long-established tradition of confessional fiction with mentally disturbed women at its centre. Like Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted, Galloway explores the complexities of the patient-doctor relationship. Where she differs is her sustained satire of the meagre attempts of doctors and psychiatrists to help their patients out of spiralling depressions. It is this sense of social critique that helped Galloway win two top awards--the American Academy EM Forster Award and the MIND/Allan Lane Book award--for this, her first novel. --Vanessa Cook
"A real achievement; its dialogue sparks and its voice is true. For Janice Galloway the trick is simply to keep writing" (Scotsman)
"This is like a Scottish Catcher in the Rye. You actually feel you’re inside this woman’s head, it is that visceral. And having experienced a downward spiral myself, I so admire her accuracy in every detail" (Alan Cumming New York Times)
"Claustrophobic but extraordinary" (Sunday Times)
"An account from the inside of a mind cracking up...its writing is as taut as a bowstring. From brilliant title to closing injunction, it hums with intelligence, clarity, wit; and, its heroine's struggle for order and meaning seduces our minds, exposes how close we all of us are to insanity. Joy, as Galloway's heroine reluctantly lets us know that she's called, is simply that dangerous step or two nearer the edge" (Listener)
"Distressing but immaculately written" (Observer)
"This is like a Scottish Catcher in the Rye. You actually feel you’re inside this woman’s head, it is that visceral. And having experienced a downward spiral myself, I so admire her accuracy in every detail" (Alan Cumming New York Times)
"Claustrophobic but extraordinary" (Sunday Times)
"An account from the inside of a mind cracking up...its writing is as taut as a bowstring. From brilliant title to closing injunction, it hums with intelligence, clarity, wit; and, its heroine's struggle for order and meaning seduces our minds, exposes how close we all of us are to insanity. Joy, as Galloway's heroine reluctantly lets us know that she's called, is simply that dangerous step or two nearer the edge" (Listener)
"Distressing but immaculately written" (Observer)
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- PublisherVintage Classics
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 1784870137
- ISBN 13 9781784870133
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages240
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Galloway invites us into the mind of a woman on the edge, in a novel which 'resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath' (New York Times)From the corner of a darkened room Joy Stone watches herself. As memories of the deaths of her lover and mother surface unbidden, life for Joy narrows - to negotiating each day, each encounter, each second; to finding the trick to keep living. Told with shattering clarity and wry wit, this is a Scottish classic fit for our time. From the corner of a darkened room Joy Stone watches herself. As memories of the deaths of her lover and mother surface unbidden, life for Joy narrows - to negotiating each day, each encounter, each second; to finding the trick to keep living. Told with shattering clarity and wry wit, this is a Scottish classic fit for our time. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781784870133
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Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. From the corner of a darkened room Joy Stone watches herself. As memories of the deaths of her lover and mother surface unbidden, life for Joy narrows - to negotiating each day, each encounter, each second; to finding the trick to keep living. Told with shattering clarity and wry wit, this is a Scottish classic fit for our time. Seller Inventory # B9781784870133
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