MEMOIR: ANN MARIE HOURIHANEreviews All Made UpBy Janice Galloway Granta, 31pp. £16.99
THIS IS THE second volume of Janice Galloway’s memoir, and it ends with the young Janice leaving school and going to university. Pretty predictable stuff, you might think, but in fact Janice’s academic success was statistically unlikely and an enormous surprise to her family, teetering as it permanently was on the precipice of self-destruction, cruelty and sudden violence.
One of the interesting things about All Made Upis that the self-destruction, cruelty and sudden violence come from a family that is now comprised entirely of females, Janice's drunken father having died at the end of the previous volume, the much-praised This Is Not About Me.
This book opens on this all-female household, made up of the 12-year-old Janice, her battered mother (whose only hope is Janice), and Cora, Janice’s sister, who is 17 years her senior.
Cora is an extraordinary figure and the dominant force in the book. One might say that Cora has borderline personality disorder. By page 11 she has broken her sister’s nose with a headbutt. On page 289 she sends a plate of stew, thrown like a frisbee, on to an evening dress that the author has borrowed from a more glamorous friend.
Cora, like most of the great figures of literature, exists without explanation. She arrived back at her mother’s house on her 20th birthday, leaving her husband and baby son elsewhere. Her glamour, which the author spots as a form of drag, is carefully noted, along with her perfect knitting and her lovers.
All three of the women are natty dressers and are firm believers in a girl exploiting her erotic capital, long before the term was coined. In one of her warmer pronouncements Cora tells Janice: “Keeping yourself nice is half the bloody battle. Now bugger off and get me a coffee.” She is this book’s much-needed macho figure.
Indeed, if the book has one lesson it is that being a seriously sexy woman – as all three are, a fact confirmed by the cover photo of the young Janice – is more trouble than it’s worth.
Her mother’s one remaining romantic belief is in the power of education. “University was my mother’s idea,” writes Janice. In her youngest child her mother is lucky, because Janice is not only very bright but also studious. When she achieves high marks in the entrance examination for the academy, a sort of Scottish grammar school, mother and daughter apply for school-clothing vouchers. The maternal instructions are clear: “Don’t you say a word at school about that. I’m a widow. Our financial affairs are private. Remember I can pull you from school if you don’t behave.”
Reading about the academy in the Ireland of the 21st century fills one with sadness. Here is a school where the teachers truly are the gatekeepers to a better future, just as Janice’s mum believes; where a music teacher calls into a mother at her work in order to discuss her daughter’s career prospects. The teacher also sends working-class children home with musical instruments, and Janice starts on the violin as a matter of routine. That was the Scottish education system 30 years ago.
Unfortunately, another person’s secondary-school education, no matter how impressive, does not make for riveting reading. Cora would have thrown the part of this book dealing with the academy straight out of the window, and rightly so. Rather disturbingly, things only perk up when the 15-year-old Janice starts having sex with her boyfriend in an arrangement he calls, in a very 1970s phrase, “a fair exchange”.
Janice and a nicer boyfriend go looking for contraception in the Scotland of the 1970s but are innocent enough to request it from a Dr O’Flynn. In a cultural bind that will be familiar to Irish readers, the young couple are refused chemical contraception but allowed to drink in pubs every weekend. “Sex was bad and booze was good. Tradition. O tempora! O mores! O Caledonia.”
Janice’s subsequent abortion unites the Galloways for the first time. Cora even gives her a nightie to wear in hospital.
There are two problems with this book. First, it is hard to believe that even the young Janice Galloway kept accurate notes throughout her childhood. She reproduces conversations seemingly verbatim but without quotation marks, so we do not know whether they are fact or fiction. The book’s title itself is not reassuring in this regard.
Second, and more importantly, the shadow of the first volume hangs over this one. Readers are left with the impression that the even larger dramas – Janice’s father’s life, her mother’s suicide attempt – ended before we arrived. However, this book is worth it for Cora alone. Almost.
Ann Marie Hourihane is an Irish Timescolumnist
