You may well, at some point, have known a girl like Cora: big, loud, gregarious, 'full-on all over'; talented in smoke-rings, hand-jiving, arm-wrestling, withering looks; the one who always seems to know about make-up, pop stars, sex and contraception; with 'a laugh like a sewer when the notion took her and no time to lose'. She's sharp, unfocused, 'within an ace of spontaneous combustion', her restlessness requiring constant smoking, knitting and television, cryptic crosswords and four library books a week just to keep it half in check. There was a girl a bit like this up the road from me when I was a teenager, and still we discuss what might have become of her: so vivid and yet so unknowable, a blaze of glory bringing behind it an awful darkling storm. But for Janice Galloway, the wonder and the horror is that Cora is her very own big sister, 16 years her senior and already pregnant and off to Glasgow when Janice is barely born; only to flounce back home to Saltcoats, 'clawed . . . free from motherhood and sprung like a steel trap' in 1960, when Janice is nearly five.

LRB 9 October 2008 | PDF Download