Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51801 in Books
• Published on: 1991-03-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Janice Galloway's The Trick Is to Keep Breathing opens with a woman watching herself from the corner of a darkened room. Immediately, Janice Galloway sweeps us inside her heroine's confused psychology. Alone in her flat, the woman (ironically named "Joy") sits quietly in the dark, nervously checking the clock, jumping at the shrill ring of the telephone. We learn through a series of flashbacks that the twin deaths of her married lover and her mother have brought her to this state of intense neurosis: "I don't feel as if I'm really here at all". Fragmented sentences and an irregular typography help to capture her deepening sense of dislocation and bewilderment.

With such a depressing subject matter at hand, it would be easy for Galloway's prose to become irritatingly introverted. With her sharp wit, however, Galloway skilfully prevents her narrative from sliding into egotism and self-pity. There is a host of minor characters to provide comic relief--the overweight, awkward health visitor; the pompous, irascible doctor; the man from the bookies who is desperate to seduce her; and the ever-mad Ros, another patient on the psychiatric ward where Joy inevitably ends up.

Galloway is writing in a long-established tradition of confessional fiction with mentally disturbed women at its centre. Like Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted, Galloway explores the complexities of the patient-doctor relationship. Where she differs is her sustained satire of the meagre attempts of doctors and psychiatrists to help their patients out of spiralling depressions. It is this sense of social critique that helped Galloway win two top awards--the American Academy EM Forster Award and the MIND/Allan Lane Book award--for this, her first novel. --Vanessa Cook

Synopsis
A young drama teacher in the West of Scotland suffers deep psychological problems which affect all areas of her life. She fails to find meaning in anything around her, but in her search she strips situations of their conventional values and sees them in a sharp, new light.

Customer Reviews

Great Honest Literature
I read this book for school but I absolutely loved it. It is amazing how it conveys real feelings yet it is not overly moving/disturbing. I came away from this book with a greater understanding of myself and society as a whole. It's a must-read for young women.

A great fearless little book
'The Trick is to Keep Breathing' is one of my favorite books. It is beautifully constructed: a gripping story, powerfully told. The prose is deceptively simple, using a variety of forms (including the typesetting itself) with elegance and poignancy. Although the subject is bereavement and loss, it is ultimately about forgiveness and recovery. And quite a journey. Very moving. Highly recommended. BTW: has also been adapted for stage and radio.

Not bad
Not a bad book at all. Quite hard to get into at some parts though, and quite frustratng to understand with its constant sentence trailing and randomness. Still, I had to study this book for a course and its excellent to write about for academic purposes. Janice Galloway is an excellent writer (and a lovely woman who I had the plesure of meeting) and this is certainly exceptional for a first book. Dont be put off it though, its a must read and certainly an amazing story. Only problem is, if you sit and read it in half an hour streches or more, you feel like you're going mad yourself!!