Trick Is to Keep Breathing

by Janice Galloway

Overview

This inventive first novel explores the widespread problem of female depression. A 27-year-old drama teacher named Joy Stone is losing her grip on the world. The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture the narrator, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental death of her illict lover, but on herself. She reads horoscopes, plucks hairs, holds conversations inside and outside herself. A terrible memory tries to unfold but is resisted. Family and friends take on monstrous or pitiful guises; food threatens to become a major character. Clutching at the wrong things, the trick is to find those that let life go on. As things seen, things bought, and things said become obsessions, so the author conjures up the homely or horrifying world of litter in which the reader, like the heroine, lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564780812
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	08/27/2014
Series:	Scottish Literature Series
Edition description:	Available Again ed.
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.57(w) x 8.49(h) x 0.71(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Authors of the stories come from all over Scotland and represent a wide mix of gender, age and cultures. Celebrity contributors include Alexander McCall Smith, writer of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency series; award winning film and stage actor Brain Cox, Michael Rosen, who was Children's Poet Laureate from 2007 to 2009, and writer Janice Galloway, whose latest book was This is Not About Me.

Editorial Reviews

"Meticulously observed, agonizing and funny... [an] unconventional account of clinical depression... --Publishers Weekly

Dalkey Archive Press

"Galloway provides sentences blazing with light, a gorgeous draft of terror." --Observer

Dalkey Archive Press

From the Publisher

Meticulously observed, agonizing and funny, this unconventional account of clinical depression marks the novelistic debut of the author of the praised short-story collection Blood . Drama teacher Joy Stone has become severely depressed following the death of her married lover. Surrounded by his effects in the house they briefly shared, she can't summon the will to work or even to eat, nor can she benefit from the concern of her friends. Interspersed flashbacks to the day of her lover's death have a sensual, physical quality that contrasts vividly with Joy's present detachment. The nature of Joy's illness--and its accurate depiction, captured partly by an unusual spacing of the text in addition to journal entries, interviews and impressionistic passages--makes her a difficult choice for a narrator: readers may lose patience with her lassitude or be unwilling to put in the time needed to decipher the basic plot. However, the ironic, self-mocking tone that ultimately saves Joy also saves the narrative. Faced with an impersonal health care system, her sense of the ridiculous takes over, and with it self-reliance. Galloway delivers a thoughtful, witty chronicle of depression and potential renewal. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Imagine yourself walking across a tightrope that doesn't stay taut and perfectly still, so that keeping your balance is difficult. This is Joy Stone's task. A prolonged depression, the source of which is never identified, propels her to a psychiatric hospital for help. But help is what she gets precious little of, in spite of meeting with a bunch of generally nameless doctors-a simple yet brilliant way to depict the impersonal nature of the hospital and how doctors and patients interact. Joy narrates by means of journal entries interspersed with letters and snippets of songs or poems, and vivid descriptions stand out. Joy does not indulge in self-pity about her depression or guilt over the accidental death of the married man with whom she had an affair. The journal format makes the book seem choppy at times, but the choppiness reinforces the sense of being off balance. Joy leaves the hospital just as she entered it-voluntarily. This absorbing winner of a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and shortlisted entry for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Scottish First Book of the Year is for most fiction collections.-Lisa Nussbaum, Euclid P.L., Ohio

Library Journal