Tags
Book Review, Janice Galloway, Laurence Sterne, Literary Fiction, Sanity and Madness, Scottish writer, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, Tristram Shandy
New York Times book review said it best
The front of my paperback edition carries the following strapline from a NYT book review: ‘Resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath’
That is it, in a nutshell. Both Laurence Sterne’s Tristram 
Shandy and Plath’s The Bell Jar are, above all, wonderful and creative pieces of writerly craft. As is this. Janice Galloway combines the plangent, melancholy, mordantly funny, sharp-eyed anarchic WEIRDNESS of Tristram Shandy with the excruciatingly painful, honest, revelatory expose of a mind (very like yours and mine) cracking and giving way under the pressures of holding it together in a world which seems set-up precisely to force shattering in the first place – like The Bell Jar.
A beautifully constructed book, which like Tristram Shandy uses the visual aspect of what a printed book looks like to express something of what the book is about – without giving too much away here, as i don’t want to spoil the reader in their surprised response. This book, in non-linear fashion is the story of one woman and how she holds (and does not hold) together. Galloway, as I realise from having previously read two volumes of her later published autobiography This is Not About Me and All 
Made Up, has distilled some of her own life into this imaginative fiction.
The prizes and awards this first novel garnered are deserved and unsurprising. And, most searingly, the MIND/Allan Lane award. Aspects of mental health care are scorchingly shown.
Be warned, this book will have you laughing at the black humour of our protagonist at the very moment that the fierceness of her pain feels like a knife in the gut
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing Amazon UK
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing Amazon USA
Lady Fancifull 
You must be logged in to post a comment.