Now available in paperback
Jenny Turner writes:
Just because something really happened doesn’t make it a good story: perhaps the noblest saw in the writing-class canon applies even more to memoir than to anything else. Galloway is not a particularly historical or sociological writer: her memories are personal, lyrical, embodied, often sensual. And yet, myself Scottish and of contiguous period, I sometimes gasped at her recollection of things sensed, words articulated which, until I saw them written in her book, I had not even realised had a particular provenance in a particular time and place: rain mates, pixie hoods and ‘ragings’, the ‘chuntering’ of the washing-machine, ‘the smell of spit on hankies and the feelings of choking (top buttons, the attaching of scarves or ties)’. Sometimes, I had the strangest sensation that Galloway was, somehow, reimagining not just her own childhood, but that it was my own mother, grandmother, classmates I was seeing: Janice’s fingers in their knitted gloves, slipping and sliding against the knob as she fights to open a door; the primary school photo, ‘the whole class, buckled under, socialised, emerged from infancy with shining success . . . Look deeper, however, look harder and there’s something of defence even in the faces of the children I thought were popular, the sporty ones, the kids with bikes, the collected-at-the-gate set with proud big sisters and brothers the size of men.’
(LRB 9 October 2008)
Granta | hardback
|ISBN:
9781847080615
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