This is Not About Me By Janice Galloway Granta, 341pp. £16.99'SOME TIME between Christmas and the New Year, we lost a lot of things.
What we acquired was a boxroom above the doctor's surgery, a two-ring hob and a sink behind a curtain, a divan settee, no toilet."
The events that precipitate this loss and the cobbled-together life that follow are the subjects of the first full-length non-fiction work by award-winning Scottish writer Janice Galloway. Galloway's previous books have included the novels The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, considered a contemporary classic of Scottish literature, and Clara, a biographical novel about the pianist and composer Clara Schumann. This Is Not About Me tells of the author's first 12 years, spent on Scotland's west coast.
The story itself is not unusual in the annals of contemporary memoir. Janice's father is a menacing drunk, a man whose mere presence causes the chest to tighten and the ears to prick. After he locks her mother Beth out of the house and forces Janice to play draughts with him while her mother "moans like a seal" outside, Beth finally flees, taking Janice with her.
For Janice, life without Father has its charms: " . . . this was bliss. Just the two of us. We had no letters, no visitors, no surprises. What we did have was a dependable monotony under layers of umber and bottle and burial-plot brown, this wonderful little rat-cage of a room." It wasn't to last. They had just been to see Snow White when their blissful monotony was shattered. "My mother opened the attic out, beyond the shipwreck of drying frames, the sheets yet to be folded, and in she came . . . lit up a fag, shook the match to death and scanned the place for an ashtray. There wasn't one. Jesus, she said. Is this it?" "She" is Cora, the sister Janice had never known. By the time Janice was born - an unpleasant surprise to her mother - Cora had already married, left home and had a baby. Now, here she is, 21 years old, arrived from Glasgow with no child, no explanation, and no return ticket.
Janice's wide-eyed fascination quickly turns to fear and loathing, for Cora is a nasty piece of work. After having bedded a sailor in front of Janice, she proceeds to beat her. She sets fire to her sheet music, makes her stand on a chair and sing out the window, bounces her nose off the iron bed-end for buying their mother the wrong birthday present, and sometimes refers to her as "it". She doesn't cook, clean or buy groceries, and is prone to saying things such as, "You show me a woman who's ugly . . . and I'll show you a woman who's a lazy bitch". Much of the memoir revolves around Cora and her imposing presence.
But Cora, with her utter self-absorption and petty sadism, is too one-dimensionally awful to be entirely interesting. It is the mother who - despite the fact she doesn't smoke, drink, gamble, gossip, throw parties or collect men - is the more complex and mysterious figure. By turns heroic and craven, she is strong enough to escape an abusive husband and take care of two daughters on a ten bob weekly widow's pension and a job as a dinner lady, and yet is incapable of standing up to the bullying Cora.
One senses in Beth a fundamental kindness and, along with an acquiescence to the demands of motherhood, a well of regret. As a child, Janice is aware of the sensation that "everything good was in another time, another place and this life she led, the here and now was waste, ashes, ruins". If the mother remains a somewhat shadowy character, the fact is perhaps faithful to the child's point of view and in keeping with one of the memoir's themes: that as children, we stumble along on the basis of a few facts and a lot of guesswork and misinformation. The mix was even more prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, before there were mountains of books instructing parents how to talk to their children about, well, everything. In Janice's world, the big events never have corresponding explanations. The reader, like the young Janice, never learns the story behind Cora's abandonment of her husband and child: "It was always the same in our house. Nothing you knew was solid." When their mother returns from the hospital after having written a note and taken too many pills, she says simply, "I wasn't well . . . It won't happen again." When Janice's best friend suddenly disappears, Janice thinks: "Maybe she was staying with a relative, maybe she'd shifted school. Maybe anything, really. Nobody ever explained the details . . . what was true would remain a mystery."
Within this twilight world, the child - and the writer-to-be - attempts to stake a claim for her own version of things. In one of the book's few explicit elucidations of this impulse, Galloway writes: "If I continued to know that the garden was a field and what a torn lip tasted like, I was on my own. Collusion or loneliness: without knowing the words, one is aware of the choice . . . A child's memory bears no more relationship to reality than a cartoon, surely: a scramble of imperfect synaptic snaps put together any old how. An adult, on the other hand, is in possession of the whole picture. This understanding throws us all sooner or later. Unquestioned, it will throw you entirely away."
Galloway is a very intelligent writer and one wishes she would have allowed herself more space to explore such tensions. Instead she relies on the everyday details of childhood and family life to carry the book, some of which are interesting, some less so. However, the memoir is a welcome addition to Galloway's varied and impressive body of work.
• Molly McCloskey is the author of two collections of short stories and a novel, Protection