Trick is to Keep Breathing [Paperback]

Janice Galloway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

An account from the inside of a mind cracking up. . . its writing is as taut as a bowstring. From brilliant title to closing injunction, it hums with intelligence, clarity, wit; and, its heroine's struggle for order and meaning seduces our minds, exposes how close we all of us are to insanity. Joy, as Galloway's heroine reluctantly lets us know that she's called, is simply that dangerous step or two nearer the edge' LISTENER.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Drama teacher Joy Stone is losing her grip. In a captivating story of the onset and evolution of depression, her problems accumulate, denial activates, and food becomes a major player. Through the wit and irony that is gaining international applause, Galloway crafts the chicken-or-egg dilemma of life in our times and being depressed. Yet even through her growing obsessions and the metamorphoses of family and friends into suspicious characters, Galloway's main character and the reader find that the trick in living rests with the simplest things.

From Publishers Weekly

Meticulously observed, agonizing and funny, this unconventional account of clinical depression marks the novelistic debut of the author of the praised short-story collection Blood . Drama teacher Joy Stone has become severely depressed following the death of her married lover. Surrounded by his effects in the house they briefly shared, she can't summon the will to work or even to eat, nor can she benefit from the concern of her friends. Interspersed flashbacks to the day of her lover's death have a sensual, physical quality that contrasts vividly with Joy's present detachment. The nature of Joy's illness--and its accurate depiction, captured partly by an unusual spacing of the text in addition to journal entries, interviews and impressionistic passages--makes her a difficult choice for a narrator: readers may lose patience with her lassitude or be unwilling to put in the time needed to decipher the basic plot. However, the ironic, self-mocking tone that ultimately saves Joy also saves the narrative. Faced with an impersonal health care system, her sense of the ridiculous takes over, and with it self-reliance. Galloway delivers a thoughtful, witty chronicle of depression and potential renewal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564780813
• ISBN-13: 978-1564780812
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #460,729 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Janice Galloway is one of the UKs most distinctive and versatile authors. Her first novel (The Trick is to keep Breathing, now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic) was shortlisted for three major prizes and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won both the McVitie's Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters EM Forster Award, while her third, Clara, won the Saltire in 2002. Collaborative texts include libretti, art installation texts, and four extended works with Anne Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her latest book, This is not about Me, won the SAC non- fiction Book of the Year Award 2009. She has one husband and one son and lives in Lanarkshire, Scotland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, March 10, 2002

By 

Matthew Hovious (London/Madrid) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trick is to Keep Breathing (Paperback)

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.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Painful, but So Beautiful, May 18, 2000

By 

Lauryn Angel-cann (Frisco, TX) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trick is to Keep Breathing (Paperback)

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Breaking Apart, August 15, 2008

By 

M BRINSLEY - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trick is to Keep Breathing (Paperback)

Tense, fractured, unorthodox, often brilliant prose takes us into a mind that is slowly cracking apart, despite the narrator's heroic, nail-shredding efforts to maintain a grip on reality. Throughout the book, she teeters on the edge of madness, fit neither for life, nor for the strait-jacket, going in and out of an asylum, in a disorienting, see-saw journey. Oddly enough, we identify with the tortured soul, and I often found myself rooting desperately for her recovery. The taut, frenetic, often foreshortened, sentences (which sometimes abruptly cut into white space) make for a challenging, unorthodox, sometimes telegraphic, read. There are flowing, suddenly truncated, segments of mental clarity and the sense of the narrator's life cracking, melting, and breaking, in a series of crafty, disturbing, surreal images. There is no sense of a 'whole' life, only of its fragments and remnants--often strewn across a whole swathe of days--like the maimed, mouldering pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. The book is disturbing, sometimes funny and Galloway, ever-creative, has devised a clever, broken, narrative all her own. It is the book that the author of 'Prozac Nation' might wish that she had written.