Published: 04/05/2009
ISBN: 9781847080998
129x20mm
352 pages

This Is Not About Me

Janice Galloway

From her earliest years with a boozy, accident-prone father and a reluctantly pragmatic mother, Janice Galloway’s grew up as a watcher – careful and vigilant. Then her parents’ marriage broke up and mother and daughter moved to an attic above a doctor’s surgery. When her big sister Cora returned home, with her steady stream of boyfriends, snappy dress sense and matching temper, evasion became a way of life. This is a funny and telling book about the routine dependencies and confusions, hopes and triumphs of childhood; it is also a book about emergence, as, slowly, the beginnings of unsuspected rage pushed the silent girl towards her voice.

Sublime prose and fierce honesty set it apart ... Part of Galloway's skill in This is Not About Me is how she keeps a child's sense of bewilderment and secret understanding

Telegraph

Blistering, terrifying, always moving

Independent on Sunday

Galloway provides sentences blazing with light, a gorgeous draft of terror

Observer

The Author

Janice Galloway is a prize-winning author of three novels, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, winner of the MIND Book of the Year Award; Foreign Parts, winner of the McVitie’s Prize, and Clara, winner of the E.M. Forster Award, the Creative Scotland Award, and the Saltire Book of the Year Award. She is also the author of two memoirs This is Not About Me, winner of the SMIT Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and All Made Up; and of two previous collections of short stories. She has written and presented three radio series for BBC Scotland and works extensively with musicians and visual artists. She lives and works in Lanarkshire, Scotland.

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