Published: 01/04/2010
ISBN: 9781847083067
Granta Books
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 award-winning author of short stories, novels and memoir. Her novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing was winner of the MIND Book of the Year Award; Foreign Parts was winner of the McVitie’s Prize, and Clara was 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. Her latest book, Jellyfish, was published in 2019. She has written and presented three radio series for BBC Scotland and has collaborated with musicians and visual artists. She lives and works in Lanarkshire, Scotland.

More about the author →