Trick Is To Keep Breathing

My interest in the band "Garbage" led me to this book - its title was used by them to create a chillingly magnificent song on their second CD. I found the book itself to be one of the most creative and compelling works I read this year. The story it tells gets under your skin to such a point that I don't recommend it for those already depressed. For the rest of us, it is a chilling look inside a sympathetic character, a young woman dancing around the border between sanity and madness. She knows she is on the verge of losing it all, and knows she is not getting the kind of help she needs from anyone - least of all the mediocre medical personnel who see her as just one more casefile. Yet she's unable to shake the helplessness and displays the lack of will to take control of her own life which is so often found in the insane and/or suicidal. Galloway makes extremely skilled use of innovative page layouts and even unexpected graphics to really show us her character's imbalanced view of the world. We see through her eyes.

Galloway's novel about the depression and life of a middle-aged, female drama teacher living in Scotland, is captivating and insightful. Galloway uses snapshots from Joy's memory as well as emotion filled diction to create a fictional novel with a lasting effect and unique style. This first person narritive, written from the point of view of Joy Stone, a female battleing a depression over the death of her lover. "Sometimes things get worse before they get better. Sometimes they just get worse. Sometimes all that happens is passing time...The whole point is that time passes. That things fade" (Galloway, The Trick is To Keep Breathing). The novel tracks Joy during a year of her depression and gives a more personal understanding of the world of female depression.

This novel is painful to read because Janice Galloway's descriptions of Joy Stone's feelings and experiences are so accurate. We've all felt the way Joy feels at some time or another. The accuracy is so startling that at times it's tempting to forget that this is fiction, and not a non-fiction depression narrative, like "The Beast" or "Girl, Interrupted." Perhaps this is why Galloway added the subtitle, "A Novel." This novel is truly inspiring; it's refreshing to read a novel about depression which maintains a sense of humor. Galloway uses a number of unusual narrative techniques, including spontaneously breaking into dialogues when she's on the phone or talking to doctors, and putting comments in the margins to represent the thoughts that we all have, but don't always acknowledge, even to ourselves. This is a novel I'm sure I'll go back to again and again, because even though the subject matter is depressing and painful, this novel is so beautifully written and the ending is uplifting. This novel will be with me for quite some time.

Galloway's account of a young woman's depression is written in a gripping style that includes interesting devices such as characters' thoughts printed in the margins and sometimes bleeding off the page in mid-letter, creating an emotional reading experience that will both exhaust and fascinate the reader. A dark book that certainly surprised me when I found a small university press version and, ultimately, one of the best modern novels I've read

Scottish writer Janice Galloway's first novel focuses on the weight of grief borne in isolation, and the possibility of healing. In The Trick is to Keep Breathing, the narrator's boyfriend has drowned while they were on vacation together. He had been in the process of getting a divorce from his wife, but most of the inhabitants of the small Scottish town where they lived did not know that; the narrator thus does not have even the small comfort of the right to grieve publically. At his funeral, she sits in a rear pew trying to maintain her composure while the priest and guests comfort his legal wife. Over a period of months, she goes through the motions of living, slowly doling out fragmented memories of her boyfriend to the reader, as if remembering him and his drowning all at once would overwhelm her. Finally, when has remembered him entirely and allowed herself to grieve with all her heart, a tiny scrap of hope comes to her: if she just remembers to keep breathing, a time will come when she will begin to feel alive again. Ms. Galloway tells this moving story with an understated intensity and a black humor that make it leap off the page. At times she uses a somewhat experimental, very original style that leaves a strong personal stamp; in making her narrator so distinct an individual, Galloway makes her pain very vivid for the reader. Very highly recommended!