This Is Not About Me

Janice Galloway

From Shelf: Delightfully honest memoirs to devour

'My mother thought I was the menopause' - one of Britain's greatest contemporary novelists turns her focus, in luminous, powerful prose, to her eccentric childhood in the 1950s and '60s.

From her earliest years with a boozy, accident-prone father and a reluctantly pragmatic mother, Janice Galloway grew up as a watcher - careful and vigilant. Then her parents' marriage broke up and mother and daughter moved to an attic above a doctor''s surgery. When her big sister Cora returned home, with her steady stream of boyfriends, snappy dress sense and matching temper, evasion became a way of life. This is a funny and telling book about the routine dependencies and confusions, hopes and triumphs of childhood; it is also a book about emergence, as, slowly, the beginnings of unsuspected rage pushed the silent girl towards her voice.