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The Trick Is to Keep Breathing
Janice Galloway's inventive first novel is about the breakdown of a 27-year-old drama teacher named Joy Stone. The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture Joy, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental drowning of her illicit lover, but on herself. While painful and deeply serious, this is a novel of great warmth and it's the wit and irony found in moments of despair that prove to be Joy's salvation. First published by Polygon in 1989 and Dalkey Archive Press in 1994, now available again.
236 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1989
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9755 people want to read
About the author
Janice Galloway
49 books139 followersJanice Galloway was born in Ayrshire in 1955 where she worked as a teacher for ten years. Her first novel, The Trick is to keep Breathing, now widely considered to be a contemporary Scottish classic, was published in 1990. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, Scottish First Book and Aer Lingus Awards, and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. The stage adaptation has been performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, the Du Maurier Theatre, Toronto and the Royal Court in London. Her second book, Blood, shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, People's Prize and Satire Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the McVitie's Prize in 1994. That same year, and for all three books, she was recipient of the E M Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her story-collection, Where you find it, was published in 1996, followed by a series of collaborative installation texts for sculptor Anne Bevan, published by the Fruitmarket Gallery as Pipelines in 2000. Her only play, Fall, was performed in Edinburgh and Paris in spring, 1998. She was the recipient of a Creative Scotland Award in 2001.
Monster, Janice's opera by Sally Beamish, exploring the life of Mary Shelley, was world premiered by Scottish Opera in February 2002. Her third novel, Clara, based on the tempestuous life of pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, was published by Cape the same year and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (Eurasia category) and the SAC Book of the Year, going on to win the Saltire Book of the Year. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 2003. Boy book see, a small book of "pieces and poems", also appeared in 2002. In 2003, Janice recorded Clara as Scottish RNIB's first audio book.
Rosengarten, Janice's 2003 collaboration with Anne Bevan exploring obstetric implements and the history of birthing, is now part of the premanent collection of the Hunterian Museum, and is also available as a book.
In 2006, Janice won the Robert Louis Stevenson Award to write at Hotel Chevillon in Grez sur Loing, and in 2007, was the first Scottish receipient of the Jura Writer’s Retreat.
Janice has also worked as a writer in residence for four Scottish prisons and was Times Literary Supplement Research Fellow to the British Library in 1999. Her radio work for the BBC has included the two-part series Life as a Man, a major 7-part series entitled Imagined Lives, In Wordsworth's Footsteps and Chopin’s Scottish Swansong.
Monster, Janice's opera by Sally Beamish, exploring the life of Mary Shelley, was world premiered by Scottish Opera in February 2002. Her third novel, Clara, based on the tempestuous life of pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, was published by Cape the same year and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (Eurasia category) and the SAC Book of the Year, going on to win the Saltire Book of the Year. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 2003. Boy book see, a small book of "pieces and poems", also appeared in 2002. In 2003, Janice recorded Clara as Scottish RNIB's first audio book.
Rosengarten, Janice's 2003 collaboration with Anne Bevan exploring obstetric implements and the history of birthing, is now part of the premanent collection of the Hunterian Museum, and is also available as a book.
In 2006, Janice won the Robert Louis Stevenson Award to write at Hotel Chevillon in Grez sur Loing, and in 2007, was the first Scottish receipient of the Jura Writer’s Retreat.
Janice has also worked as a writer in residence for four Scottish prisons and was Times Literary Supplement Research Fellow to the British Library in 1999. Her radio work for the BBC has included the two-part series Life as a Man, a major 7-part series entitled Imagined Lives, In Wordsworth's Footsteps and Chopin’s Scottish Swansong.
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March 17, 2020
The Trick Is To Keep Reading!
Sometimes it strikes me as utterly bizarre. Reading. Those tiny black signs on white paper that I continue to stare at for hours each day. What a strange thing to do. And what incredibly diverse emotions those tiny black signs evoke in me. What complete contrasts they generate, depending on which tiny black signs I choose to read at the same time. In this case, I read Galloway straight after Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, and the effect is ... strong!
If Lispector shows the independent soul of a wild young woman who takes pleasure in living on her own conditions, free to choose her life according to her inclination, Galloway shows the exact opposite with the same brilliant writing skill.
"Near To The Captive Heart" would be a suitable title for the novel. Or to paraphrase the complete James Joyce quote that gave Lispector's novel its English title ("He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life"): "She was under scrutiny, unhappy and near to the captive heart of life".
SHE is Joy Stone, a woman facing loss without finding the tools to deal with it. Her pain dictates her choices, and her eating disorder, mental illness and difficult sexuality are described in a prose that gets under the skin in a tormentingly effective and sometimes surprisingly witty way.
Is it because she works as a teacher that I feel so strongly about her slow breakdown? Is it because the description of her bulimia mentions the details nobody ever admits? Is it because she tries so hard to find meaning that she literally feels her brain dissolve in the process? I don't know. Comparing Galloway's Joy to Lispector's Juana, the difference between being strong and wild and weak and lost lies in the MINDING.
If you mind not having answers to the eternal questions, you break down. Juana accepts the unknowable questions in herself and in the gods of her imagination, while Joy is desperate to find answers she knows not to exist. Both women are highly intelligent - impossible to control through routines and authorities - but they handle their divergence from mainstream life with different success.
When Joy enters a ward for mentally unstable patients and faces the authority of the medical system, her experience is not far from that of the inmates in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Who is really insane? The patient who knows she is suffering, or the doctor, who carelessly offers an assembly line treatment without purpose or effect? Who lives his life sponging on the sensitive people who are not fit to face the pain of the world? Who does absolutely nothing to actually improve the situation for those who seek help?
The meaninglessness of the method is further proof of the lack of meaning overall. In the end, the trick is to keep breathing, to live on, to accept the pain.
"Women have this tendency to think things will get better if they wait longer...", Joy thinks. Waiting for parents to love them more, waiting to marry the man of their dreams, waiting to get away from the man they married, waiting, waiting, waiting...
The passive life of letting others do things to you while you keep breathing is at the core of Joy's misery. To break the vicious circle, she has to forgive life for not giving her the answers.
She has to swim - not to drown.
Brilliant! Utterly painful.
Sometimes it strikes me as utterly bizarre. Reading. Those tiny black signs on white paper that I continue to stare at for hours each day. What a strange thing to do. And what incredibly diverse emotions those tiny black signs evoke in me. What complete contrasts they generate, depending on which tiny black signs I choose to read at the same time. In this case, I read Galloway straight after Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, and the effect is ... strong!
If Lispector shows the independent soul of a wild young woman who takes pleasure in living on her own conditions, free to choose her life according to her inclination, Galloway shows the exact opposite with the same brilliant writing skill.
"Near To The Captive Heart" would be a suitable title for the novel. Or to paraphrase the complete James Joyce quote that gave Lispector's novel its English title ("He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life"): "She was under scrutiny, unhappy and near to the captive heart of life".
SHE is Joy Stone, a woman facing loss without finding the tools to deal with it. Her pain dictates her choices, and her eating disorder, mental illness and difficult sexuality are described in a prose that gets under the skin in a tormentingly effective and sometimes surprisingly witty way.
Is it because she works as a teacher that I feel so strongly about her slow breakdown? Is it because the description of her bulimia mentions the details nobody ever admits? Is it because she tries so hard to find meaning that she literally feels her brain dissolve in the process? I don't know. Comparing Galloway's Joy to Lispector's Juana, the difference between being strong and wild and weak and lost lies in the MINDING.
If you mind not having answers to the eternal questions, you break down. Juana accepts the unknowable questions in herself and in the gods of her imagination, while Joy is desperate to find answers she knows not to exist. Both women are highly intelligent - impossible to control through routines and authorities - but they handle their divergence from mainstream life with different success.
When Joy enters a ward for mentally unstable patients and faces the authority of the medical system, her experience is not far from that of the inmates in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Who is really insane? The patient who knows she is suffering, or the doctor, who carelessly offers an assembly line treatment without purpose or effect? Who lives his life sponging on the sensitive people who are not fit to face the pain of the world? Who does absolutely nothing to actually improve the situation for those who seek help?
The meaninglessness of the method is further proof of the lack of meaning overall. In the end, the trick is to keep breathing, to live on, to accept the pain.
"Women have this tendency to think things will get better if they wait longer...", Joy thinks. Waiting for parents to love them more, waiting to marry the man of their dreams, waiting to get away from the man they married, waiting, waiting, waiting...
The passive life of letting others do things to you while you keep breathing is at the core of Joy's misery. To break the vicious circle, she has to forgive life for not giving her the answers.
She has to swim - not to drown.
Brilliant! Utterly painful.
January 21, 2019
The Trick Is to Keep Breathing is grief's answer to The Bell Jar; a stark and honest depiction of one woman struggling to cope in the aftermath of her illicit lover's death. Janice Galloway seamlessly depicts the virtual impossibility of functioning while grieving; how it creeps into every facet of your life and renders you a shell of yourself. But at the same time, this story quickly graduates past its initial premise: it's clear that the ironically named Joy was never really fine, that the existential dread she's experiencing was always there beneath the surface, that her lover's death only served to unearth it.
It's hard to believe this is a debut novel, as Galloway's prose is so accomplished and her insights so sharp. It's also a rather experimental novel, especially for 1989, playing with fonts types and sizes and margins, its stream of consciousness style taken to stylistic extremes. I found this to be an intense and stimulating read, my one complaint being that its repetitive nature didn't always work for me, though it was clearly intentional. Anyway, an essential read for anyone interested in mental health narratives (and Scottish lit!). I'm very happy that a Goodreads group I'm in found this hidden gem that had previously not been on my radar.
It's hard to believe this is a debut novel, as Galloway's prose is so accomplished and her insights so sharp. It's also a rather experimental novel, especially for 1989, playing with fonts types and sizes and margins, its stream of consciousness style taken to stylistic extremes. I found this to be an intense and stimulating read, my one complaint being that its repetitive nature didn't always work for me, though it was clearly intentional. Anyway, an essential read for anyone interested in mental health narratives (and Scottish lit!). I'm very happy that a Goodreads group I'm in found this hidden gem that had previously not been on my radar.
February 1, 2012
Confession: I can't stand looking at a crying woman.
I don’t want seeing any woman hurt. I’ve been surrounded by women in my life who at some point in their lives cried: my maternal grandmother, my mother, my sister, my wife, my daughter and even some of my officemates, my friends or even total strangers.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate them because they cry. I don’t want seeing people extremely sad that they have to shed tears. I don’t believe in happy tears. I think those tears come down because they are, deep inside, still sad. Let’s say they are crying because their big problem suddenly vanished: the father survived a critical operation, a lover came back after many years, a son was found alive in the earthquake rubble, etc. I think they cry because they are losing sadness. They are afraid of what they are about to face because they’ve been so used to having that sadness in their hearts.
Over a period of 3 years here in Goodreads, I have been encountering these beautiful, beautiful novels about women-characters who are extremely sad that every page where they appear has this funereal, dark, gloomy and somber atmosphere even if you are reading in a well-lighted room or under direct sunlight. You check your eyes. You ask yourself if you’re tired because you find everything around you gloomy as if there is a solar eclipse at high noon. It’s this power these authors bring to the reader. Through their fictional characters they can channel their personal grief and melancholy to their readers. They are really powerful that I found myself wallowing in sadness while reading the sentiments of these characters:
Read any of these books if you want to find out how some women who are still in love when dumped by their men would behave and feel like. They just don’t cry a river (like that Barbra Streisand song). They can also get crazy. They can get suicidal.
And that is scary and should be a warning to all men to think twice about dumping their women. I can't imagine how these men being able to bear looking at their crying lovers and they can even say “it’s me, not you.”
Bleeech! Love is not a game that people play.
I don’t want seeing any woman hurt. I’ve been surrounded by women in my life who at some point in their lives cried: my maternal grandmother, my mother, my sister, my wife, my daughter and even some of my officemates, my friends or even total strangers.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate them because they cry. I don’t want seeing people extremely sad that they have to shed tears. I don’t believe in happy tears. I think those tears come down because they are, deep inside, still sad. Let’s say they are crying because their big problem suddenly vanished: the father survived a critical operation, a lover came back after many years, a son was found alive in the earthquake rubble, etc. I think they cry because they are losing sadness. They are afraid of what they are about to face because they’ve been so used to having that sadness in their hearts.
Over a period of 3 years here in Goodreads, I have been encountering these beautiful, beautiful novels about women-characters who are extremely sad that every page where they appear has this funereal, dark, gloomy and somber atmosphere even if you are reading in a well-lighted room or under direct sunlight. You check your eyes. You ask yourself if you’re tired because you find everything around you gloomy as if there is a solar eclipse at high noon. It’s this power these authors bring to the reader. Through their fictional characters they can channel their personal grief and melancholy to their readers. They are really powerful that I found myself wallowing in sadness while reading the sentiments of these characters:
1. Joy Stones in The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway. Joy lost his husband in an accident while they were vacationing. Then she got into relationship with a married man who after few years ditched her. She now lives alone but still goes to school to teach children. She goes with the motion and the book is about her daily lives. She is suicidal in solitude, in hopelessness.
The writing is exceptional and stylish. This is my first time to see notes written on the page margins as if telling me that the character is pushed to the limit of her loneliness. It gives you the feeling that you are with Joy Stones in her claustrophobic lonely house, or world. You are there imagining yourself hearing Joy telling herself: “the trick (for me not to die) is to keep breathing.” She is really, really sad and I felt it.
2. The woman narrator in The End of the Story by Lydia Davis. She is now married but she still loves the young struggling writer that she grew up with (Paul Auster it seems). The book is about hoping to find Auster when she goes back to the town they used to live together. Also mostly about her daily activities. Imagine having a husband and you are still thinking of your old flair. You want to see him but not sure how you will feel.
3. Sasha Janssen in Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys. Ditched by her lover who still stays in the hotel but has no money to pay the rent. This was during World War II in Paris. She is so lonely I felt like going to that hotel and pay the rent so she will stop wallowing in sadness. My handsome brother liked this book and thought that this was the saddest of all the books he has ever read.
4. Lea in The End of Cheri by Colette. A Parisian elitist woman ditched by her boy toy. It is not as dark and gloomy as the first three books but the writing of Colette makes the book a very interesting read. It has that naughty-girl tone yet as it has Paris during WWII as the setting, you’d feel the unstated danger lurking in the horizon. The May-December affair is subtle and there is practically no extended and unnecessary love scene but you will feel the nature of the relationship between the young boy and the old woman.
Read any of these books if you want to find out how some women who are still in love when dumped by their men would behave and feel like. They just don’t cry a river (like that Barbra Streisand song). They can also get crazy. They can get suicidal.
And that is scary and should be a warning to all men to think twice about dumping their women. I can't imagine how these men being able to bear looking at their crying lovers and they can even say “it’s me, not you.”
Bleeech! Love is not a game that people play.
June 17, 2013
The Trick is to Keep Reading.
That is what I had to keep telling myself every 25 pages or so. I would have to break away and move to another book for a bit, before I could breathe in and come back, always willingly, to this Keep Breathing of a novel.
There is not too much of a plot in this book. It is the account of a young woman in shock after her lover drowned in a camping resort during holidays abroad. Instead of action what Janice Galloway offers us, brilliantly, is the inner pulsing of a depressed mind.
Galloway has Joy Stone, a woman aged 27, narrating the story in first person. In spite of her first name, Joy Stone has a soul that is weighing on her more than her second name. Trapped in her body she tries to undo her Self through anorexia that, amongst other things, will eat away her gums. She is also prone to sudden bursts of other disfiguring initiatives, such as cutting short her hair and dyeing it with strident colors. She is self–inflicting but her broken language, full of non sequitur thoughts and unfinished sentences, is never self-deprecating. Her conception of time is also broken. Galloway uses italics to help us identify flashbacks, but lets Joy narrate the present in disconnected blocks. Stone succeeds in disembodying herself through her account.
Galloway has also granted Stone with a very candid language. Many of Joy’s observations become as lucid as those of any acute social critic. As Joy is detaching herself from her surroundings, her comments can at times throw the reader off-balance and have an awakening affect. Her language can break a sunken mind out of its stupor.
Amidst the drama of witnessing the hopeless despair of this young woman in deep mourning for her lost happiness, I was struck by the humor in the book. The account is toned with a subtle irony becoming at times a blatant parody. Stone/Galloway puts mental medical assistance in utter ridicule.
Humor is brought not only by the joke that Joy herself repeats, repeats, repeats, and repeats (count of four times):
Q: How many Psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One. But the light bulb must really want to change.
But particularly, the scenes with her dialogues with a series of shrinks (appropriately named Doctor One, Doctor Two and Doctor Three), just made me burst out laughing.
But it is exhausting to live inside a depressed mind. All those irrelevant details upon irrelevant details of this painstakingly observant mind, take up so much of the reader’s energy because they are recorded without affection.
I will have to admit, though, that I am not too interested in this kind of barren self-absorption. I prefer tales of fighters, of adventurers, of discoverers and the personalities of creative people who are full of vitality. I look for expansive vistas, and not microscopic visions. I am not talking about triumphalism. Accounts of persons who summon up strength in the face of adversity awaken awe. I prefer to feel fascination.
This takes me to consider which can be the possible reactions to suffering or utter distress. In my recent reading of Magda Denes Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War, anger offered the saving path. Luise Rinser’s Prison Diary Gefangnistagebuch would be another. In The Trick, we see Joy on her way to recovery because she ends up picking one of the possible paths suggested by a Self-Help magazine, forgiveness.
But I ask myself, to what extent is one entitled to blame and exculpate anyone because that person’s death has sunk one in loneliness and misery. What about the sorrow for the other person’s loss of life?
P.S.: If I am allowed a pedantic comment, in the early scene in a Spanish camping resort a local boy comes to tell Joy the news of a drowned Michael, calling on her attention with a: “Signora, Signora!”… Well, that’s Italian, not Spanish.
January 9, 2010
Depression, like Karen described Heroin addicts in her review for the sadly out-of-print novel Like Being Killed, is boring, self-absorbed and narcissistic. Depressed people are generally no fun for anyone. For happy people I imagine them to be unfathomable springs of annoyance. Why can’t they just get on with their life, I believe they would say (maybe they say other things, happy people can feel free to enlighten me here). For other folks of melancholy dispositions, dealing with other depressed people is usually just as annoying, even if in the back of their minds they realize that what they dislike seeing in the other is also present in themselves.
But, depression is a key component to our cultural landscape. As Lewis Black said (in a paraphrase) during his book reading to the question of ‘how do you write’, or maybe it was ‘why do you write’. “Happy people don’t write books. There is something sick about sitting in front of a computer for hours by yourself and writing. Normal people don’t do that.” He probably had some swear words thrown in, and said it better than I remember him saying it. The key is that happy well adjusted people don’t generally find the need the purge / exploit their pathos on to the written page, or into good music or whatever other medium one wants to use here. This is probably why writers don’t fair so well on the per capita scale of leading happy, non-alcoholic lives that don’t way too often end in self-destruction. Good writers are able to not wallow in their own self-absorbed problems though, and are able to transcend themselves.
Some books though do wallow (dis)gloriously in depression. This is one such book. This book isn’t for everyone, actually not for most people. It’s a claustrophobic novel stuck in the narrator’s head as her own demons play out on her. The world outside of her head rarely intrudes, and even when it does it is only through the filter of her own pathos that the reader gets to see that exterior landscape. The narrator is totally self-absorbed in her own thoughts and problems, but there is no glorification involved, the line is never crossed that pushes the book into self-pitying melodrama, or the total whiny, ‘I just can’t live with this world because I’m so much better than it, and because I’ve been forced to live in this world with all these shallow and vapid people I’m oh so sad’. Comparing this book to David Zweig’s Swimming Inside the Sun, is telling. It’s like the two poles of how to deal with the question of self-absorbed depression in a book, one that works wonderfully and one that fails abysmally (of fails wonderfully also, if failure was the intended effect, which these days who can tell sometimes).
January 20, 2019
How do you write a book about grief and depression that’s raw and palpably real, yet also make it mordantly funny without losing any of its gravitas? I don’t know, but Janice Galloway clearly does.
This book is now 30 years old, you can tell because the people in it:
write letters
use pay phones
(buy and) read magazines
go to the bookies
but it still feels fresh and sharp as anything. Galloway uses little techniques like lists, dialogue in script format, scraps of letters etc that could veer into gimmicky but they don’t. Instead I found this incredibly immersive, like being inside Joy’s head (yep, the character’s name is Joy, har har), this very real and very broken person. And she’s also stuck inside her head, over-analysing every tiny thing as she tries to pull herself back from the dark void her life has become.
Even though the subject matter (mental health, struggling with how we feel vs how we are expected to behave) is well trod literary ground, something about The Trick Is to Keep Breathing feels essential. Loved it.
This book is now 30 years old, you can tell because the people in it:
write letters
use pay phones
(buy and) read magazines
go to the bookies
but it still feels fresh and sharp as anything. Galloway uses little techniques like lists, dialogue in script format, scraps of letters etc that could veer into gimmicky but they don’t. Instead I found this incredibly immersive, like being inside Joy’s head (yep, the character’s name is Joy, har har), this very real and very broken person. And she’s also stuck inside her head, over-analysing every tiny thing as she tries to pull herself back from the dark void her life has become.
There are split seconds in the morning between waking and sleep when you know nothing. Not just things missing like where or who you are, but nothing. The fact of being alive has no substance. No awareness of skin and bone, the trap inside the skull. For these split seconds you hover in the sky like Icarus. Then you remember.
Even though the subject matter (mental health, struggling with how we feel vs how we are expected to behave) is well trod literary ground, something about The Trick Is to Keep Breathing feels essential. Loved it.
September 24, 2012
Brief Interviews With Hideous Readers
B.I. #12
Dublin
Q.
I want something light and airy. Reading is hard. After a tough day’s work, I don’t want to do any thinking. My occupation is so important, and I have to concentrate so hard, and exert myself so strenuously, that I simply cannot focus on a page of prose for more than ten minutes without collapsing in a twitching spasming heap on the floor when I get home, so I need extremely easy, unchallenging narratives that introduce me to some topic I can talk to people in the workplace about, not mind-straining intellectual masturbation.
Q.
I work for a pharmaceutical company, that’s all I’d like to say.
B.I. #19
Chicago
Q.
Look, people don’t like reading. Who wants to read fucking Proost or fucking Dostoshevski these days? What we need is the nonbook. The book that isn’t a book. People like having read a book and feeling all smart and self-important. People don’t learn things or “take things” from the books they read. There are no messages or morals anymore. Lolita: don’t fall in love with underage girls. Crime & Punishment: don’t kill your landlady and her sister. It’s bullshit. My proposal for the nonbook is this: simply have a cool cover, an appealing blurb, and one page stating the book’s overall purpose or moral or whatever inside. Skip the boring process of actually having to fucking read.
Q.
No I don’t. I’m fed up with these fucking book Nazis, these losers everywhere wasting their lives with their heads in pages. And I’m supposed to feel inferior to these people? No way.
B.I. #65
Manchester
Q.
Donna: I like what I like. So what if I read popular novels? I don’t care. I have no time for literary snobs, all these magazines telling me what to read. I don’t want to read hard books. I read for pleasure. I read to laugh and get off. I don’t want to read Tolstoy. What does he have to teach us about anything? I don’t want to learn things from books. I live in the world, I learn things from living in the world. I want escapism. My life is hard enough. Why add more difficulty to a life that is already really hard?
Q.
I am executive for Microsoft. I take in about £3,000,000 per year.
B.I. #71
Not Stated
Q.
Pageturners! I love them. I don’t really take any of the words in. It’s the sensation of turning the page, getting to the next one, and that feeling of having reached the end! Who cares about the words! I want to turn pages. Licking the thumb, peeling it over, and flattening the next page. That’s where it’s at!
Q.
Nah. I don’t care about words or meanings or whatever. I just wants to turn them pages! Pages, pages, pages! Turning, turning, turning!
B.I. #12
Dublin
Q.
I want something light and airy. Reading is hard. After a tough day’s work, I don’t want to do any thinking. My occupation is so important, and I have to concentrate so hard, and exert myself so strenuously, that I simply cannot focus on a page of prose for more than ten minutes without collapsing in a twitching spasming heap on the floor when I get home, so I need extremely easy, unchallenging narratives that introduce me to some topic I can talk to people in the workplace about, not mind-straining intellectual masturbation.
Q.
I work for a pharmaceutical company, that’s all I’d like to say.
B.I. #19
Chicago
Q.
Look, people don’t like reading. Who wants to read fucking Proost or fucking Dostoshevski these days? What we need is the nonbook. The book that isn’t a book. People like having read a book and feeling all smart and self-important. People don’t learn things or “take things” from the books they read. There are no messages or morals anymore. Lolita: don’t fall in love with underage girls. Crime & Punishment: don’t kill your landlady and her sister. It’s bullshit. My proposal for the nonbook is this: simply have a cool cover, an appealing blurb, and one page stating the book’s overall purpose or moral or whatever inside. Skip the boring process of actually having to fucking read.
Q.
No I don’t. I’m fed up with these fucking book Nazis, these losers everywhere wasting their lives with their heads in pages. And I’m supposed to feel inferior to these people? No way.
B.I. #65
Manchester
Q.
Donna: I like what I like. So what if I read popular novels? I don’t care. I have no time for literary snobs, all these magazines telling me what to read. I don’t want to read hard books. I read for pleasure. I read to laugh and get off. I don’t want to read Tolstoy. What does he have to teach us about anything? I don’t want to learn things from books. I live in the world, I learn things from living in the world. I want escapism. My life is hard enough. Why add more difficulty to a life that is already really hard?
Q.
I am executive for Microsoft. I take in about £3,000,000 per year.
B.I. #71
Not Stated
Q.
Pageturners! I love them. I don’t really take any of the words in. It’s the sensation of turning the page, getting to the next one, and that feeling of having reached the end! Who cares about the words! I want to turn pages. Licking the thumb, peeling it over, and flattening the next page. That’s where it’s at!
Q.
Nah. I don’t care about words or meanings or whatever. I just wants to turn them pages! Pages, pages, pages! Turning, turning, turning!
January 19, 2019
“GOD IS THE MISSING INGREDIENT IN THE CAKE OF LIFE”
I thought this was amazing. I’ve never read anything like it and it felt like one of the missing books - something I’ve always wanted to read but didn’t even know existed. I had a vague idea who Janice Galloway was, but I’ve already ordered two second-hand copies of this to pass on and I’ll probably do peoples’ heads in going on about it.
I thought this was amazing. I’ve never read anything like it and it felt like one of the missing books - something I’ve always wanted to read but didn’t even know existed. I had a vague idea who Janice Galloway was, but I’ve already ordered two second-hand copies of this to pass on and I’ll probably do peoples’ heads in going on about it.
April 6, 2015
Many years ago, I read The Bell Jar: this is what I wanted and didn't get from it. While Plath's novel was full of details and attitudes that seemed really alien to me, Galloway's character is incredibly, worryingly familiar.
That's the thing about it, of course: I'm not the only person to see shades of myself in Joy Stone (I see what you did with her name, Janice Galloway), but the things I recognise are probably different to the next person. But it's so relatable, so very, very reasonable, that I felt like I could practically follow the logic with my finger. Those connections are my connections. Those associations are my associations. I've also lived off black coffee and baking for other people. I've also lived alone, with my friends very far away. I feel like I understand so much about this book that even the things that are foreign to me - and there are lots of those, too - feel extremely personal.
And beyond that, there's the deftness of it. The ebb and the flow of the language, the sentences and paragraphs left dangling - but we all know what fits into those spaces. Halfway between stream of consciousness and explanation, Joy drifts towards and away from suicidal feelings like the tide, pausing sometimes to remind you that she's still remembering to keep breathing. Just about. That's the trick.
I can't believe this is Janice Galloway's first novel.
It's deft, and it's clever, and wry and knowing and (I think) really, really Scottish. I hope not too much of it is as personal as it seems; I hope the Glaswegian mental health system has got better since 1990. I hope it didn't cost her as much as it seems like it might do, to let this book out into the world, see it on bookshelves and read it aloud and answer questions about it.
I read it in two days, because you can't take too long over a book like this, even if you try to.
Grief.
The friend who lent me Morvern Callar also lent me this, and apart from the glee that I've got myself a Crazy Scottish Lady-Literature Fairy, I'm adding her to the list of people who just somehow seem to get my reading taste. Really pleased with this one.
That's the thing about it, of course: I'm not the only person to see shades of myself in Joy Stone (I see what you did with her name, Janice Galloway), but the things I recognise are probably different to the next person. But it's so relatable, so very, very reasonable, that I felt like I could practically follow the logic with my finger. Those connections are my connections. Those associations are my associations. I've also lived off black coffee and baking for other people. I've also lived alone, with my friends very far away. I feel like I understand so much about this book that even the things that are foreign to me - and there are lots of those, too - feel extremely personal.
And beyond that, there's the deftness of it. The ebb and the flow of the language, the sentences and paragraphs left dangling - but we all know what fits into those spaces. Halfway between stream of consciousness and explanation, Joy drifts towards and away from suicidal feelings like the tide, pausing sometimes to remind you that she's still remembering to keep breathing. Just about. That's the trick.
I can't believe this is Janice Galloway's first novel.
It's deft, and it's clever, and wry and knowing and (I think) really, really Scottish. I hope not too much of it is as personal as it seems; I hope the Glaswegian mental health system has got better since 1990. I hope it didn't cost her as much as it seems like it might do, to let this book out into the world, see it on bookshelves and read it aloud and answer questions about it.
I read it in two days, because you can't take too long over a book like this, even if you try to.
Grief.
The friend who lent me Morvern Callar also lent me this, and apart from the glee that I've got myself a Crazy Scottish Lady-Literature Fairy, I'm adding her to the list of people who just somehow seem to get my reading taste. Really pleased with this one.
Read
February 27, 2017Not sure if it's just me or the effect of reading but I'm feeling distinctly light-headed.
Empty. A faint buzzing in the ears and the distant sound of march music. Sparrows squabbling over the fat balls and the craah of a jackdaw.
Food. Food helps, and plenty of water. Or tea. More tea.
One thing: when weathering a storm of adversity, avoid women's magazines and the NHS.
Another thing: Read more Janice Galloway.
Persistence is the Only Thing that Works.
Everything Worth Having is Hard as Nails.
The trick is not to think. Just act dammit.
Act.
Empty. A faint buzzing in the ears and the distant sound of march music. Sparrows squabbling over the fat balls and the craah of a jackdaw.
I have lost the ease of being inside my own skin.
Food. Food helps, and plenty of water. Or tea. More tea.
Pain in the joints, boredom of stillness.
You can't stay too long in one place. Something base and human as the need to pee. The body converts and processes. It does what it can.
One thing: when weathering a storm of adversity, avoid women's magazines and the NHS.
Another thing: Read more Janice Galloway.
Persistence is the Only Thing that Works.
Everything Worth Having is Hard as Nails.
January 25, 2019
(4.5)
It is true to say I was not initially attracted to this Scottish classic from 1989, the premise seemed fairly morose and my edition from the library had a giant unappealing purple eye staring at me.
However, I am delighted to report that this book was an exceptional read. It is essentially an internal monologue from a depressed and grieving 27 year old woman, known as Joy Stone. The text is often made up of thoughts that stop mid sentence, repeated refrains that are hidden in the margins, magazine snippets and dreamy flashbacks. Eventually the reader is able to piece together the story of Joy and witness her increasingly unstable mental state.
I am making the book sound dreadfully heavy and experimental but what makes it work so well is it is also wonderfully funny. It is a skilled writer that can deftly balance wry humour with such pathos while maintaining this unique and intoxicating narrative voice. All credit to Galloway here, producing this book as her debut novel.
I won't say I want to reread this again immediately as it is hard to be in Joy's headspace for too long however it is a book that demands more than one reading to fully appreciate.
It is true to say I was not initially attracted to this Scottish classic from 1989, the premise seemed fairly morose and my edition from the library had a giant unappealing purple eye staring at me.
However, I am delighted to report that this book was an exceptional read. It is essentially an internal monologue from a depressed and grieving 27 year old woman, known as Joy Stone. The text is often made up of thoughts that stop mid sentence, repeated refrains that are hidden in the margins, magazine snippets and dreamy flashbacks. Eventually the reader is able to piece together the story of Joy and witness her increasingly unstable mental state.
I am making the book sound dreadfully heavy and experimental but what makes it work so well is it is also wonderfully funny. It is a skilled writer that can deftly balance wry humour with such pathos while maintaining this unique and intoxicating narrative voice. All credit to Galloway here, producing this book as her debut novel.
I won't say I want to reread this again immediately as it is hard to be in Joy's headspace for too long however it is a book that demands more than one reading to fully appreciate.
January 24, 2019
Hypnotic and deeply disturbing. Galloway draws me into Joy's disordered thinking and disordered life. As The Trick Is to Keep Breathing proceeds—and as Joy's depression and additional problems intensify—its narrative becomes ever more opaque. I finish the novel wondering what happened, but also afraid to know. 4.5 stars
January 29, 2019
The Trick is to Keep Breathing is one of the most psychologically immersive novels I’ve ever read. Galloway transports her reader right into the fragmented mind of her grieving, depressed protagonist (ironically named Joy haha). Although inarguably traumatised by the deaths of her mother and lover, the further you get into the novel, the more evident it becomes that Joy’s struggles with mental health are much further reaching. Galloway’s novel is a relentless exploration of an unending quest to answer the question “what is the point?” in the face of life’s immense cruelties. It is a very accomplished novel, but a difficult read.
January 28, 2019
This was a heavy book to get through. The MC goes through a psychological break following the death of her lover. You experience her disjointed thoughts and desperation as she tries to get well again. I appreciated the writing and what the author tried to do here, but didn’t enjoy it. You do feel as though you are wading through deep water right along with the MC. The ending redeemed the book for me somewhat, but this is so-so for me overall.
February 2, 2018
Ever find yourself entirely unable to describe or explain something you enjoyed reading/watching/consuming? The Trick is to Keep Breathing fits right into that category. Maybe some novels are just not meant to be reviewed. Stories are sometimes most memorable for the ways they make you feel. Charting the breakdown of a young teacher (the ironically-monikered Joy) in the wake of her partner's death, it dabbles in formal experimentation – a review quoted on the cover of my 1997 paperback copy describes it as 'Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath'. There's a surprising lightness to it, and this weird self-contained mood I've come across before in 80s and 90s fiction – maybe it's something to do with Joy's life being so recognisable in many ways, except for the absence of the internet and mobile phones, the world feeling smaller then, communities being more tangible then? Or it might be the in-a-bubble sensation of existing inside Joy's head, the drifting numbness of grief and depression. Sometimes it has the air of a particularly twisted fairytale. I can't tell you how I felt or feel about it in the end. Galloway is a magnificent chronicler of mental deterioration.
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December 23, 2018
4.5 rounded down
January 27, 2019
3.5 stars
November 19, 2021
‘I get dry and warm just thinking about the supermarket. It makes me feel rich and I don’t need to think. I can spend hours among the buckle-wheeled trolleys, fruit and fresh vegetables, tins of blueberry pie filling, papaya and mango, numbing my fingers on bags of frozen broccoli and solid chocolate gateaux. The bakery, near the scent and the warmth of the fresh rolls and sugared pastries. The adrenalin smell of coffee drifts and draws towards the delicatessen, the wedges of Edam, Stilton and Danish Blue.’
Longer than necessary. Might have loved it better if I had read it before I read Sarah Kane. Eva Baltasar. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. And Sylvia Plath. Having read all these legends, well, my expectations are blown mad high (when it comes to writing that focuses a lot on ‘mental health’). My review may be biased/unfair (to Galloway). Galloway’s work felt (I hate to phrase it this and I must apologise but) almost second-rate (to me) after having read them. A mess of very good lines tossed around a whole bunch of bland internal monologues. Drizzled with the narrator’s wildly unreliable ‘feelings’. But perhaps – Galloway’s writing just resonated with me a lot less. Still, I'd say it's a worthy read and would definitely recommend (esp. if you haven’t read any of the aforementioned writers/legends). I hate/love Galloway’s style of writing. It lost me on and off. But I appreciated it more closer to the end – realising that perhaps that that’s an intentional literary ‘technique’ – an attempt to let the readers to feel how Joy Stone felt?
‘I toy with suicide. I toy with pills, the fresh collection in my locker saved for emergencies. I toy with broken glass and razor blades, juggernauts and the tops of tall stairwells. I toy. But there’s no real enthusiasm. My family have no real talent in that direction. Every time I try to work out how to do the thing properly it cheers me up. At least there’s an escape clause if things get too much. This paradox can keep me entertained for hours till I think I’ll go nuts. Joke.’
‘I’m gawky, not a natural swimmer. But I can read up a little, take advice. I read somewhere the trick is to keep breathing, make out it’s not unnatural at all. They say it comes with practice.’
Far too many characters (in my opinion) – could’ve have settled for fewer, and that would have made the narrative and tone more effective. Maybe it’s to show the narrator’s difficulty to focus and/or (re)gain control of herself. But whatever it's for, it just makes none of the characters ‘stand-out’ or interesting enough. Is Galloway’s work a work of auto-fiction? I don’t know, but if I knew for sure that it was, then I would surely have thought it to be rather self-indulgent. Felt like reading someone else’s diary. But not in a Sylvia Plath kind of way. Nothing extraordinary. Has Phoebe Waller-Bridge ever read this? It’s a bit like Fleabag sans PWB’s tantalising dark humour and shamelessly glorious ‘bluntness’. I prefer Fleabag; I love how fucked up and shameless Fleabag is (I didn’t get that vibe from Galloway’s narrator). The transgressive layer is was what I had expected/wanted/missed/craved. I love everything PWB. If I got absolutely fukin’ shit-faced, I would tattoo Fleabag’s (smirking) face on my left butt cheek. But I don’t drink more than one/two alcoholic beverages per occasion anymore, so I guess that can’t/won’t ever happen.
‘We stayed in and drank instead. I drank more than him. There was an undertone of sex to all this but only by association: depression isn’t sexy.’
‘I can’t think how I fell into this unProtestant habit. I used to be so conscientious. I used to be so good all the time.
[where good = productive/hardworking/wouldn’t say boo] I was a good student: straight passes down the line. First year probationer taking home reams of paper, planning courses and schemes for kids that weren’t my own. People made jokes, I was so eager to please.
That’s how good I used to be.
[where good = value for money]
[where good = not putting anyone out by feeling too much, blank, unobtrusive]’
‘I watch myself from the corner of the room sitting in the armchair, at the foot of the stairwell. A small white moon shows over the fencing outside. No matter how dark the room gets I can always see. It looks emptier when I put the lights on so I don’t do it if I can help it. Brightness disagrees with me: it hurts my eyes, wastes electricity and encourages moths, all sorts of things. I sit in the dark for a number of reasons.’
Also, Danish Blue goes pretty well with persimmons. Persimmons are in season right now. God, I fucking love persimmons. I ate persimmons while reading this book. But then realised later on that the narrator has an eating disorder. I continued reading, and eating, and felt a little fucked up. In a Fleabag-ey kind of way. I love PWB. I am dying to read someone who will make me question my love for PWB. Galloway doesn’t cut it. No pun intended. (Insert iconic PWB/Fleabag smirk here) Ah. I think I just prefer Moshfegh’s and PWB’s sort of fucked-up narratives. Galloway’s narrator’s ‘I want to feel good and also want people to call me a good girl’ idealist mindset just doesn’t work for me. It just makes me miss Fleabag’s instant, loud and unabashed ‘YES?!’ when some geezer in a park shouted ‘SLUT!’ (which wasn’t even directed at her). Oh, my dear heart – in smithereens.
June 14, 2015
The Trick Is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway is a book full of desperate sadness that manages to also be funny and alternately exhausting and exhilarating. Joy Stone, an art teacher, has lost two men-a husband through break-up and, more recently, a lover through drowning. She is battling despair and self-disgust through a deep depression and anorexia. But her voice still comes through with wit and warmth. As she struggles to stay connected to this world and not the world of loss and to remain engaged with life she keeps telling herself "the trick is to keep breathing." It's a phrase that is particularly meaningful in a book that often feels suffocating. Joy's very house is burying her with mold. She seeks help through a health care system that is unresponsive and hilariously dysfunctional. For some reason, perhaps because it's a first person narrative about mental illness and includes a stint in a psychiatric ward, the book reminded me of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar but this narrator is a woman, not a girl, and has a warmth and humor missing from Bell Jar.
Joy's voice is often broken, as she is, and comes out in words, phrases, half-completed sentences. There were times I found the book so sad I had to take a break. But the life that is half-buried in Joy keeps pushing through as she searches for ways to hang on, get through her pain, and come out to some other side she can't yet imagine.
Language is one of Joy's lifelines along with her friend Marianne, who leaves her for a job in America (the story takes place in Scotland). Their correspondence is a welcome relief from Joy's claustrophobic depression (although for a depressed person, Joy has a fair amount of interaction with others, even if those interactions are unsatisfying for her).
The writing in this book is beautiful and one of its chief joys. I am both drawn and repelled by the experience of yet another depressed woman. But Joy transcends that category and emerges as a complex character who is more than her suffering.
Joy's voice is often broken, as she is, and comes out in words, phrases, half-completed sentences. There were times I found the book so sad I had to take a break. But the life that is half-buried in Joy keeps pushing through as she searches for ways to hang on, get through her pain, and come out to some other side she can't yet imagine.
Language is one of Joy's lifelines along with her friend Marianne, who leaves her for a job in America (the story takes place in Scotland). Their correspondence is a welcome relief from Joy's claustrophobic depression (although for a depressed person, Joy has a fair amount of interaction with others, even if those interactions are unsatisfying for her).
The writing in this book is beautiful and one of its chief joys. I am both drawn and repelled by the experience of yet another depressed woman. But Joy transcends that category and emerges as a complex character who is more than her suffering.
January 18, 2020
A seemingly unceasing descent to madness, The Trick is to Keep Breathing has interesting tricks up its prose. Words and phrases break down, split, and transform, sentences lose itself midway and regain their momentous back only to incoherently mesh with each other, as they steer the novel’s gnawing touch of realism. Depression enshrouds it all in its despair and darkness; the dullness and repetitive nature of work further puts weight against the novel’s already heavy narrative. In spite of its largely threatening gloom, it strips the layers of stigma against mental illness down to a degree without romanticising or highlighting it as a mere pity party; the accurate portrayal of the overwhelming lack of understanding perpetuates abuse, manipulation, at times sexual coercion, even the disgusting manner of how people treat it as a laughable matter. And the mental health care system here, as much as a reflection of reality, is thoroughly frustrating and ugly which deeply represent the problematic disregard and insensitivity not only from the government but also mental health professionals themselves. It is expectedly disappointing. Only the inclusion of family history of mental illness on the female side is a little uneven and is grazed upon in haste as it sits between unsuccessfully dying and unsuccessfully living. Nonetheless, The Trick is to Keep Breathing gasps for air in relief after nearly drowning near its end; a hold onto any fragile thread of survival just to keep going.
September 21, 2016
I have wanted to read this for absolutely ages. I am quite familiar with Galloway’s work, having read both volumes of her autobiographies which have been published thus far, and her collected short stories, but I hadn’t got to any of her novels before spotting this in the library.
I was expecting such to be the case, but The Trick Is To Keep Breathing is beautifully written from the beginning. Indeed, from the first paragraph alone, I knew that I would be awarding it at least a four-star, if not a five-star review. I must admit that I did have highly elevated hopes as to how good it would be, but it has wonderfully surpassed them all. Galloway uses the stream-of-consciousness technique to great effect, rendering her narrator’s voice almost breathless at times. This novel presents a simple premise, which has been both beautifully and believably executed.
There is an astounding amount of depth to it. It is as though Galloway has clawed away at every inch of Joy in order to learn every little thing it is possible to know about her. The Trick Is To Keep Breathing is not just a splendid novel; it is a masterpiece, and that is not a word that I apply to literature very often.
I was expecting such to be the case, but The Trick Is To Keep Breathing is beautifully written from the beginning. Indeed, from the first paragraph alone, I knew that I would be awarding it at least a four-star, if not a five-star review. I must admit that I did have highly elevated hopes as to how good it would be, but it has wonderfully surpassed them all. Galloway uses the stream-of-consciousness technique to great effect, rendering her narrator’s voice almost breathless at times. This novel presents a simple premise, which has been both beautifully and believably executed.
There is an astounding amount of depth to it. It is as though Galloway has clawed away at every inch of Joy in order to learn every little thing it is possible to know about her. The Trick Is To Keep Breathing is not just a splendid novel; it is a masterpiece, and that is not a word that I apply to literature very often.
June 21, 2015
'The trick is' not to start reading!
Page 128 and half way through. I feel I have wasted precious reading time and won't be going any further with this. Tedious, abstract, confusing, it does express the nature of mental illness well, but does nothing to entertain the reader. If anything, it's more of a fictional description of one woman's experience; a glimpse into the hopelessness of it all. It it is not make good material for 'entertaining' or 'escapist' reading. It I wanted informative accounts and insights I would choose to read a biography....I'll pass on this thanks.
Page 128 and half way through. I feel I have wasted precious reading time and won't be going any further with this. Tedious, abstract, confusing, it does express the nature of mental illness well, but does nothing to entertain the reader. If anything, it's more of a fictional description of one woman's experience; a glimpse into the hopelessness of it all. It it is not make good material for 'entertaining' or 'escapist' reading. It I wanted informative accounts and insights I would choose to read a biography....I'll pass on this thanks.
December 28, 2021
a tragic beautiful funny dark sad bleak portrait of grief. i loved it and savoured every word. like poetry. please read this book
December 4, 2009
I will come back to this after a second read. I read it in 24 hours. It has received praise for its literary qualities and I concur; don't have much to add save that the formal textual fragmentation just about works without drawing attention to itself, and is pretty minimal anyway so don't let that put you off. The thing that I will return to is my shock of recognition: here, in some way I suppose the literary or expressive does matter since the form of thinking matters to one caught in the web of psychiatric classification; outer versus inner self; inward loneliness and isolation against a dumb show of intimacy and good cheer; hopelessness and hope. As I say, I'll come back.
Considered reflection:
Sometimes, if rarely, a book comes my way which cuts through judgments and settles to alter me. In a vague, so often sentimental way, literature is claimed to be some kind of moral or spiritual or prophylactic, consolation or guide; I do not find it so generally; I usually read for a certain kind of pleasure only. It’s the sort of pleasure of the text, the narrative, the word which comes from other than literature too – the philosophical, the scientific, the polemic and so on. So too, on those occasions when a book, or it may be a painting or film, ‘cuts through’, something other than insular pleasure is taking place, something is catalysed, something understood.
Janice Galloway’s first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, has rightly received critical praise. In short, its formal qualities are inseparable from its ‘content’, the latter most difficult to contextualise since its content is itself ‘about’ a lack of form, a subject and object of identity – a self and a mind – that is in breakdown, fragmentation, contradictory tension. I don’t want to spend time here on examining the literary qualities apart from having made the point that it is a major achievement to have formalised formlessness.
Instead I want to highlight three or four aspects of the novel which have done the ‘cutting through’ for me. It should be said at the outset that although the book is by a woman, about a woman and deals with ‘mental and emotional distress’ most conventionally identified as “women’s issues”, I think that while there are many rich approaches that will have been made with this focus (and including a woman’s relationship with man), it’s only a small step to see the novel as a refraction of more general human concerns. What would unite such concerns would be the word ‘communication’: how we ‘talk to’ ourselves, to others, and how in some way we are made of a compound of these two activities.
The whole issue of mental health saturates culture these days (as well as keeping doctors busy). The qualitative state of a diagnosed ‘condition’ does indeed bear more than a passing family resemblance to serious illness: the state of ‘severe depression’, for instance, is intensely physical in its debilitating pain, and is so utterly removed from everyday miseries and unhappiness that it shares nothing but the same letters in the same order. It is almost impossible to convey the inner experience even to those one loves and trusts. Yet, there is some truth too that before some qualitative singularity emerges, so many elements of a major psychiatric condition bear resemblance not only to illness but to the normal discourses and cultures of everyday life. While the quality of disintegration in Galloway’s book is very powerful in its impact, I think that we can see our own ‘healthy’ minds and the worlds we live in reflected in the structures and elements of the marginalised, denormalised, categorised other of the ‘patient’. These elements and structures are often only revealed in their skeletal form when we are given insight to crossing an edge, a safety boundary, to a state in extremis.
So expect, if you haven’t read the book already, to find yourself enjoying a conversation with a lively, sexualised, working woman (or the woman who works part time in the betting shop on a Saturday): she doesn’t stand out at all. And expect to find a mind beneath the woman in the street with the inoffensive manner and the ready smile which is in turmoil, occasional agony, ahedonic depression, and bears an acrid mix of shame and guilt (these latter ‘moral’ words are, as a matter of empirical fact, crucial to the reported experiences of many ‘patients’ but so rarely acknowledged by their professional advisors, careworkers, the medicalised ‘system, ‘them’). Indeed, expect quite a few laughs along the way. Joy, the protagonist, is an intelligent and witty guide to some of life’s aburdities, never more so than when she is interrogating some of the ‘helpers’ she meets. But these sparks of wit are from the same heavy stones that clash together to make the other disunited flashes.
Joy is a drma teacher (part time) in a secondary school. Her pupils seem to like her, some visit her in hospital; her headteacher is solicitous but off the mark, it is impossible for him to understand. Others try to love her as they can, almost intensely with food and advice. That the world is indeed filled with good people, love and friendship, communal joy, positive values is apparent throughout the novel. She is aware of it but separate. She has lovers, complicated and intense yet even here she is only partially involved, scripted, unable to connect fully and intimately. One solid solace, friend, anxiolytic is Gin – that seductive form of self-medication which unites the mad, the bad and the normals. Understated as it is, her social life on the wards of the hospital resonates with life anywhere. Perhaps here though, with life again stripped to a sort of miminalism, some hope is apparent (and hopefulness simply through the life force of the spirit of the narrator as well as specifics is evident throughout), some dim promise of relating the self that looks inwards to the self that looks out to others.
Joy is in grief and mourning for the sudden death of the love of her life. Aha then! Reactive depression or whatever. Perhaps, but only given in the terms of the text that the awful arbitrariness of Michael’s death precipitated a crisis that had already had most of its power energised. Most people grieve ‘healthily’. Joy herself wonders whether grief should be an illness. She thinks she is wasting the time of the health service, taking away care for the needy. She is so often putting others first. In one of her characteristically humorous sketches, she puts herself on trial: “The defendant is afraid of health. There is a certain power in illness she is reluctant to relinquish for the precise reason it lets folk off the hook. People do not visit the unsick.” (p.200). She feels uwnworthy, unworthwhile, unvaluable, nothing, empty, not real, not here, going through the motions. “Maybe there’s less to me than other people think.” (Offstage: Aha! that will be low self-esteem then).
She feels she is rotten. The imagery of atrophy prevalent in the spatial elements of decriptions, the shabbiness, the mushrooms sprouting in one of her homes from rot, the council estate dystopian decay, the dirt and the washing, the cleaning, smelling, untidy, unkempt, unrespectable, - all these and more suggest her interior private self. Incidentally, the imagery of decay is continuous, not continual: the disunited ‘tracks’ of her racing mind and feelings run in parallel, sometimes overlap, appear together, fade and highlight, this formalised in writing techniques.
Joy faces several doctors, all of whom have different ideas, none of whom seem to communicate with each other. She is asked the same narrow questions time after time. She is directed, cajoled, reprimanded. For me, her exposure to the monstrous Nancy, the occupational therapist, a wretched and miserable person (one whom, ironically, I should stop and think about, understand, demonstrate more than a passing concern) represents the nadir of an already abysmal mental care system. Joy is abused by the betting shop manager (who, again, is far from a specimen of mental wellbeing), and apparently used at his convenience by David, one of her pupils.
Her best friend is, literally, absent. Before she went to Canada she left a list for Joy pinned on the kitchen wall. Things to do in the evening such as listen to the radio, phone someone nice, sew. I suppose that’s what absent friends are for. Joy conemplates the list wryly. The growth of the industry wherein people write books of advice, offer amazing miracle cures, sell all sorts of superstitions and mumbo jumbo is not only a side of exploitative greed: it represents a cultural marker of the misery and desperation of the wider ‘normal’ population. Only somebody like Joy could see through it. As William James points out in his discussion of The Sick Soul as well as much suffering there is much wisdom and insight. The line that made me laugh aloud in the novel was after Joy had read a book (an annotated contents page she quotes in full) called Courage and Bereavement given to her by Doctor Two (all the Doctors she names with a number). She sees “American Publisher. I should have known from the spelling.” Then “Chapter 10 is a prayer. The author wishes me good luck…. I read the book in two and a half hours and cried all the way through.
“Like watching Bambi.”
This distrust of and contempt for sentimentality seems to me to be a sign of a very healthy scepticism, a resource for hope, and insofar as there may be a whisper of didacticism in the novel such sprinklings of the protagonist’s undiminished self, strong and stable, do suggest what is summated in the title. Sentimentality, brutal classificatory systems, sheer everyday ‘nastiness’, are to some extent kept at bay: the world out there becomes chimerical since the inward voice drives the soul.
There’s nothing to protect us from arbitrariness and the almost tragic impossibilities of communication. We know that all the distractions, the maxims, the books, the kindly attempts to get us out of ourselves, can’t reach our suffering and insubstantiality, our confusion and pervasive dreads. But perhaps if we rethink the whole summation of human miseries into one word, somehow a strength emerges. The name of that word would be Sorrow. The name of the young woman whose story we followed is Joy.
Considered reflection:
Sometimes, if rarely, a book comes my way which cuts through judgments and settles to alter me. In a vague, so often sentimental way, literature is claimed to be some kind of moral or spiritual or prophylactic, consolation or guide; I do not find it so generally; I usually read for a certain kind of pleasure only. It’s the sort of pleasure of the text, the narrative, the word which comes from other than literature too – the philosophical, the scientific, the polemic and so on. So too, on those occasions when a book, or it may be a painting or film, ‘cuts through’, something other than insular pleasure is taking place, something is catalysed, something understood.
Janice Galloway’s first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, has rightly received critical praise. In short, its formal qualities are inseparable from its ‘content’, the latter most difficult to contextualise since its content is itself ‘about’ a lack of form, a subject and object of identity – a self and a mind – that is in breakdown, fragmentation, contradictory tension. I don’t want to spend time here on examining the literary qualities apart from having made the point that it is a major achievement to have formalised formlessness.
Instead I want to highlight three or four aspects of the novel which have done the ‘cutting through’ for me. It should be said at the outset that although the book is by a woman, about a woman and deals with ‘mental and emotional distress’ most conventionally identified as “women’s issues”, I think that while there are many rich approaches that will have been made with this focus (and including a woman’s relationship with man), it’s only a small step to see the novel as a refraction of more general human concerns. What would unite such concerns would be the word ‘communication’: how we ‘talk to’ ourselves, to others, and how in some way we are made of a compound of these two activities.
The whole issue of mental health saturates culture these days (as well as keeping doctors busy). The qualitative state of a diagnosed ‘condition’ does indeed bear more than a passing family resemblance to serious illness: the state of ‘severe depression’, for instance, is intensely physical in its debilitating pain, and is so utterly removed from everyday miseries and unhappiness that it shares nothing but the same letters in the same order. It is almost impossible to convey the inner experience even to those one loves and trusts. Yet, there is some truth too that before some qualitative singularity emerges, so many elements of a major psychiatric condition bear resemblance not only to illness but to the normal discourses and cultures of everyday life. While the quality of disintegration in Galloway’s book is very powerful in its impact, I think that we can see our own ‘healthy’ minds and the worlds we live in reflected in the structures and elements of the marginalised, denormalised, categorised other of the ‘patient’. These elements and structures are often only revealed in their skeletal form when we are given insight to crossing an edge, a safety boundary, to a state in extremis.
So expect, if you haven’t read the book already, to find yourself enjoying a conversation with a lively, sexualised, working woman (or the woman who works part time in the betting shop on a Saturday): she doesn’t stand out at all. And expect to find a mind beneath the woman in the street with the inoffensive manner and the ready smile which is in turmoil, occasional agony, ahedonic depression, and bears an acrid mix of shame and guilt (these latter ‘moral’ words are, as a matter of empirical fact, crucial to the reported experiences of many ‘patients’ but so rarely acknowledged by their professional advisors, careworkers, the medicalised ‘system, ‘them’). Indeed, expect quite a few laughs along the way. Joy, the protagonist, is an intelligent and witty guide to some of life’s aburdities, never more so than when she is interrogating some of the ‘helpers’ she meets. But these sparks of wit are from the same heavy stones that clash together to make the other disunited flashes.
Joy is a drma teacher (part time) in a secondary school. Her pupils seem to like her, some visit her in hospital; her headteacher is solicitous but off the mark, it is impossible for him to understand. Others try to love her as they can, almost intensely with food and advice. That the world is indeed filled with good people, love and friendship, communal joy, positive values is apparent throughout the novel. She is aware of it but separate. She has lovers, complicated and intense yet even here she is only partially involved, scripted, unable to connect fully and intimately. One solid solace, friend, anxiolytic is Gin – that seductive form of self-medication which unites the mad, the bad and the normals. Understated as it is, her social life on the wards of the hospital resonates with life anywhere. Perhaps here though, with life again stripped to a sort of miminalism, some hope is apparent (and hopefulness simply through the life force of the spirit of the narrator as well as specifics is evident throughout), some dim promise of relating the self that looks inwards to the self that looks out to others.
Joy is in grief and mourning for the sudden death of the love of her life. Aha then! Reactive depression or whatever. Perhaps, but only given in the terms of the text that the awful arbitrariness of Michael’s death precipitated a crisis that had already had most of its power energised. Most people grieve ‘healthily’. Joy herself wonders whether grief should be an illness. She thinks she is wasting the time of the health service, taking away care for the needy. She is so often putting others first. In one of her characteristically humorous sketches, she puts herself on trial: “The defendant is afraid of health. There is a certain power in illness she is reluctant to relinquish for the precise reason it lets folk off the hook. People do not visit the unsick.” (p.200). She feels uwnworthy, unworthwhile, unvaluable, nothing, empty, not real, not here, going through the motions. “Maybe there’s less to me than other people think.” (Offstage: Aha! that will be low self-esteem then).
She feels she is rotten. The imagery of atrophy prevalent in the spatial elements of decriptions, the shabbiness, the mushrooms sprouting in one of her homes from rot, the council estate dystopian decay, the dirt and the washing, the cleaning, smelling, untidy, unkempt, unrespectable, - all these and more suggest her interior private self. Incidentally, the imagery of decay is continuous, not continual: the disunited ‘tracks’ of her racing mind and feelings run in parallel, sometimes overlap, appear together, fade and highlight, this formalised in writing techniques.
Joy faces several doctors, all of whom have different ideas, none of whom seem to communicate with each other. She is asked the same narrow questions time after time. She is directed, cajoled, reprimanded. For me, her exposure to the monstrous Nancy, the occupational therapist, a wretched and miserable person (one whom, ironically, I should stop and think about, understand, demonstrate more than a passing concern) represents the nadir of an already abysmal mental care system. Joy is abused by the betting shop manager (who, again, is far from a specimen of mental wellbeing), and apparently used at his convenience by David, one of her pupils.
Her best friend is, literally, absent. Before she went to Canada she left a list for Joy pinned on the kitchen wall. Things to do in the evening such as listen to the radio, phone someone nice, sew. I suppose that’s what absent friends are for. Joy conemplates the list wryly. The growth of the industry wherein people write books of advice, offer amazing miracle cures, sell all sorts of superstitions and mumbo jumbo is not only a side of exploitative greed: it represents a cultural marker of the misery and desperation of the wider ‘normal’ population. Only somebody like Joy could see through it. As William James points out in his discussion of The Sick Soul as well as much suffering there is much wisdom and insight. The line that made me laugh aloud in the novel was after Joy had read a book (an annotated contents page she quotes in full) called Courage and Bereavement given to her by Doctor Two (all the Doctors she names with a number). She sees “American Publisher. I should have known from the spelling.” Then “Chapter 10 is a prayer. The author wishes me good luck…. I read the book in two and a half hours and cried all the way through.
“Like watching Bambi.”
This distrust of and contempt for sentimentality seems to me to be a sign of a very healthy scepticism, a resource for hope, and insofar as there may be a whisper of didacticism in the novel such sprinklings of the protagonist’s undiminished self, strong and stable, do suggest what is summated in the title. Sentimentality, brutal classificatory systems, sheer everyday ‘nastiness’, are to some extent kept at bay: the world out there becomes chimerical since the inward voice drives the soul.
There’s nothing to protect us from arbitrariness and the almost tragic impossibilities of communication. We know that all the distractions, the maxims, the books, the kindly attempts to get us out of ourselves, can’t reach our suffering and insubstantiality, our confusion and pervasive dreads. But perhaps if we rethink the whole summation of human miseries into one word, somehow a strength emerges. The name of that word would be Sorrow. The name of the young woman whose story we followed is Joy.
September 27, 2015
I won this book in a giveaway and I have to admit, I probably wouldn't have picked this book up on my own, but I am so glad that I got a chance to read this Scottish modern classic.
First of all I would like to say that this novel contains triggers for anorexia, anxiety and depression, amongst other mental health issues. There are also sex scenes throughout, some of which are very uncomfortable to read about because of the mental state of the protagonist.
Usually this wouldn't be the type of book that I would feel comfortable reading but I found that, although this was quite a depressing read, it wasn't bland like Stoner and there was always hope permeating through the text.
The writing style was extremely unique; the protagonist, Joy, writes in first person and the writing really portrays her mental state throughout. There are broken sentences, single word lines, dialogue laid out as script, lists, and other unusual formats, that make up the novel overall. It was incredibly captivating to read and it almost felt like a real diary or account.
Overall I would highly recommend this book if you are interested in psychology or mental health issues. This would also be great to pick up if you want to experience more Scottish literature.
First of all I would like to say that this novel contains triggers for anorexia, anxiety and depression, amongst other mental health issues. There are also sex scenes throughout, some of which are very uncomfortable to read about because of the mental state of the protagonist.
Usually this wouldn't be the type of book that I would feel comfortable reading but I found that, although this was quite a depressing read, it wasn't bland like Stoner and there was always hope permeating through the text.
The writing style was extremely unique; the protagonist, Joy, writes in first person and the writing really portrays her mental state throughout. There are broken sentences, single word lines, dialogue laid out as script, lists, and other unusual formats, that make up the novel overall. It was incredibly captivating to read and it almost felt like a real diary or account.
Overall I would highly recommend this book if you are interested in psychology or mental health issues. This would also be great to pick up if you want to experience more Scottish literature.
April 5, 2018
This was ok. It's a book about a 27 year old girl who descends into depression and is institutionalized at some point also. The writing was beautiful in places but i didn't fully understand what was going on at times. Maybe that was the point of the writing to confuse you so that you got a better understanding of the confusion that the protagonist is going through. Here are a few of the best bits for me from the book:
There are split seconds in the morning between waking and sleep when you know nothing. Not just things missing like where or who you are, but nothing. The fact of being alive has no substance. No awareness of skin and none, the trap inside the skull. For those split seconds you hover in the sky like Icarus and then you remember.
There are split seconds in the morning between waking and sleep when you know nothing. Not just things missing like where or who you are, but nothing. The fact of being alive has no substance. No awareness of skin and none, the trap inside the skull. For those split seconds you hover in the sky like Icarus and then you remember.
September 29, 2021
There are split seconds in the morning between waking and sleep when you know nothing. Not just things missing, like where and who you are, but nothing. The fact of being alive has no substance. No awareness of skin and bone, the trap inside the skull. For these split seconds, you hover in the sky, like Icarus. Then, you remember.
The Trick is to Keep Breathing is an experimental novel about a woman’s experience of clinical depression in the wake of a loved one’s death. The protagonist is an unreliable narrator, whose worldview is warped and whose secrets and flaws gradually become apparent. Blurb notwithstanding, the details of her life – her name, her occupation, her age, her relation to the deceased – are revealed intermittently over the course of the book, and feel almost irrelevant in comparison with her depression, which is so central and forceful that it almost feels like a main character in as of itself. This immobilizing weight of depression impairs every aspect of the protagonist’s mind and body, to the point that she often struggles to eat or speak.
Galloway’s writing is excellent. The author demonstrates how experimental style and straightforward storytelling can go hand in hand. Take this passage, for example: I used to spend a lot of time waiting. Women do. Women have this tendency to think things will be better if they wait longer, i.e. when I get away from my mother, when I live with the man I love, when I get away from the man I love, when my mother loves me more, anyone loves me more, when I finish the diet, buy new clothes, get a haircut, buy new makeup, learn to be nicer, sexier, more tolerant, turn into someone else. In stream of consciousness style, the protagonist describes both her inner world of ruminations and her external world of tasks not yet done and mutual misunderstandings with others.
As I read through The Trick is to Keep Breathing, I wondered to myself whether or not Galloway would pull off the ending, and how. Books with this kind of tone are all too often concluded with saccharine reassurance or doom and gloom, both clichés. Galloway accomplishes something rare in that the plot tension of her book gradually and naturally falls away to a hopeful but solemn conclusion, which fits the tone of the book well. I do think that the consequences of the towards the end of the book deserved more exploration and consideration. The scene itself is poignant and well-written, but the way it affects the protagonist’s mental state in the long term is too ambiguous for my taste.
The Trick is to Keep Breathing is an exceptional novel about depression and grief, and I would recommend it to anyone who appreciates experimental fiction and how it can explore our mental landscapes. The audiobook narrated by Siobhan Redman is worth a listen if you are a fan of audiobooks.
The Trick is to Keep Breathing is an experimental novel about a woman’s experience of clinical depression in the wake of a loved one’s death. The protagonist is an unreliable narrator, whose worldview is warped and whose secrets and flaws gradually become apparent. Blurb notwithstanding, the details of her life – her name, her occupation, her age, her relation to the deceased – are revealed intermittently over the course of the book, and feel almost irrelevant in comparison with her depression, which is so central and forceful that it almost feels like a main character in as of itself. This immobilizing weight of depression impairs every aspect of the protagonist’s mind and body, to the point that she often struggles to eat or speak.
Galloway’s writing is excellent. The author demonstrates how experimental style and straightforward storytelling can go hand in hand. Take this passage, for example: I used to spend a lot of time waiting. Women do. Women have this tendency to think things will be better if they wait longer, i.e. when I get away from my mother, when I live with the man I love, when I get away from the man I love, when my mother loves me more, anyone loves me more, when I finish the diet, buy new clothes, get a haircut, buy new makeup, learn to be nicer, sexier, more tolerant, turn into someone else. In stream of consciousness style, the protagonist describes both her inner world of ruminations and her external world of tasks not yet done and mutual misunderstandings with others.
As I read through The Trick is to Keep Breathing, I wondered to myself whether or not Galloway would pull off the ending, and how. Books with this kind of tone are all too often concluded with saccharine reassurance or doom and gloom, both clichés. Galloway accomplishes something rare in that the plot tension of her book gradually and naturally falls away to a hopeful but solemn conclusion, which fits the tone of the book well. I do think that the consequences of the towards the end of the book deserved more exploration and consideration. The scene itself is poignant and well-written, but the way it affects the protagonist’s mental state in the long term is too ambiguous for my taste.
The Trick is to Keep Breathing is an exceptional novel about depression and grief, and I would recommend it to anyone who appreciates experimental fiction and how it can explore our mental landscapes. The audiobook narrated by Siobhan Redman is worth a listen if you are a fan of audiobooks.
January 28, 2019
"This is the Way Things Are.
"This is What Passes for Now…There is no dream and no waking up. This is today. The Way Things Are."
Janice Galloway's writing is brilliant and so viscerally puts you in the mind of someone sinking into a deep depression that it is uncomfortable. It has turned out for me to be one of those novels where I can't actually decide if I liked it. I appreciate it, and I'm glad I read it, but I'm also very very glad to be out of Joy Stone's head. I felt pulled down with her and it was hard to gather my own thoughts after putting the book down. While that is the mark of a truly affecting book, I can't recommend it as a nice way to spend a weekend.
"This is What Passes for Now…There is no dream and no waking up. This is today. The Way Things Are."
Janice Galloway's writing is brilliant and so viscerally puts you in the mind of someone sinking into a deep depression that it is uncomfortable. It has turned out for me to be one of those novels where I can't actually decide if I liked it. I appreciate it, and I'm glad I read it, but I'm also very very glad to be out of Joy Stone's head. I felt pulled down with her and it was hard to gather my own thoughts after putting the book down. While that is the mark of a truly affecting book, I can't recommend it as a nice way to spend a weekend.
March 11, 2024
At the core of this novel is a dark, pulsating void of black despair. If you liked The Bell Jar but feel it didn't go far enough to really stomp your emotions into a pulpy residue, I can't recommend this enough. I like books about despair and depression, I find something comforting in them.
Underneath this tale of grief is a tinge of helpless acerbic honesty that I found truly compelling and once I got into the swing of the book, I couldn't put it down. When I had finished, I felt a fleeting sense of satisfaction, like popping and draining a psychic zit full nasty emotional pus.
Underneath this tale of grief is a tinge of helpless acerbic honesty that I found truly compelling and once I got into the swing of the book, I couldn't put it down. When I had finished, I felt a fleeting sense of satisfaction, like popping and draining a psychic zit full nasty emotional pus.
September 14, 2018
A moving story of the inner thoughts of a young woman suffering from depression after a severe loss. It’s told through her own inner dialogue and journal entries. I found it quite moving and her analyzation of things not only a very good depiction of grief and depression, but some very on point truisms about life.
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