JANICE GALLOWAY
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After an absence of six years, Janice Galloway has returned with a memoir rather than a novel. Her fans won't be disappointed, though. Kirstin lnnes meets her
anice Galloway has fabulous shoes on.
You notice them immediately. She‘s
ensconced. regal and sleek. in the rather grotesque grandeur of the private drawing room in Edinburgh’s Scotsman Hotel. The fabulous shoes are slender black patent stiletto heels with a Westwood-y hint of tartan at the toe and a tiny bow. She notices and compliments my shoes. I compliment hers back.
One of the country’s most important contemporary writers has published the first volume of her memoirs; an extraordinarily detailed. beautiful book. and I’m getting gooey over her footwear. It‘s not as facile as it seems though. This is Not About Me. which traces Galloway’s life from birth to ll and centres on her early relationship with her mother and much older sister. is a book about women. about watching women. and about learning to become a woman.
Readers familiar with her work will recognise echoes of the minutely-observed detailing of constructed femininity in The Triek is to Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts resonating in the young Janice’s fascination with her sister Cora’s routines, the application of orangey panstick and painstakingly redrawn eyebrows. Cora (in real
16 THE LIST 4—18 Sep 2008
life Nora. but Galloway changed the names of her family members for reasons that will become apparent later) is. as Galloway says ‘a force of nature‘. Her sudden. glamorous appearance just after Janice‘s fourth birthday fills the book with airspray fumes and the angry rustle of skirts. ‘enough mascara to block strong sunlight‘. and the ever-present threat of violence. The place is Saltcoats. the time is the late 50s. and Cora dyes her hair the same blue-black as Elvis.
‘We came from a period where people wished to be portrayed quite differently to how they actually were.‘ Galloway says. ‘lt wasn‘t about comfort. it was about looking as though you were "getting by". My sister was the archetype of not just looking like you were getting by. but . well. . . Lord knows what Nora thought she had to look like. Getting dressed up. that was the thing.
‘People wanted to look as though they were successful. It was a working class habit from the area I came from. people really got dolled up. even to go to the pictures.‘ she recalls. ‘My mother would be horrified if she‘d ever seen anyone in a shell suit. It‘s about looking better than how you actually feel. because how you actually are is poor. I’ve never felt that was healthy. Some of the excesses of misery into which members of my family were led came frotn the feeling of not being good enough. There had been too much dressing up. of the psyche. not just of the outer self. and it led to an inability to look at where we actually were in the world.‘
Galloway has mined this territory before to an extent. Aspects of her family relationships and particular character traits may have previously found their way into her fiction. but transfigured and abstracted. She stresses that it's an unconscious transference. There’s no way. she says. she could have written this book if either