Customer Reviews

The Trick Is to Keep Breathing: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

The main character in this novel, ironically named Joy, is as deeply depressed as any character I've encountered. Joy has lost her mother to suicide and has broken off her long-term relationship with a boyfriend. She started an affair with a married man who unexpectedly dies as well.

Reviewers say the novel is full "of great warmth and energy", that "the wit and irony found in moments of despair prove to be Joy's salvation." It didn't feel that way to me.

The novel closes with Joy drinking heavily (again) while bemoaning her life (again). I didn't see any salvation for Joy; Joy felt destined for suicide. We ought to check on Galloway, too, while we're at it.

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!

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

Wow, this book might linger with me for quite a while. It's told in a stream of consciousness, diary type style which was very difficult to follow. Much like The Bell Jar, this woman's head is NOT a fun place to be. The main character, ironically named Joy, is trying to cope with the recent death of her boyfriend while they were on vacation. Her thoughts are disjointed and all over the place. There are random and often nonsensical comments written in the margins as well as flashbacks told in small bits and pieces. It's a mess but it works because Joy is an absolute mess. I thought I had dealt with depression before, turns out, my head is practically a Disney movie by comparison.


If you want an in depth, front row look into one woman's free-fall into depression, eating disorders, alcoholism, and what was sure to be an eventual suicide had the book gone any longer, than you'll want to pick this up. If you are looking for a fun lighthearted read or just have enough of your own depression to deal with, this may not be the book for you. As for me, I'm off to eat some chocolate in hopes of cheering up a bit.

The Trick is to keep Breathing is certainly one of the best books I've read all year. Both depressing and uplifting, it swings your emotions wildly from one end of the scale to another. Although the content is obviously somewhat depressing, the wry humour Galloway injects at the most unexpected moments sent me from tears to laughter in seconds. In the end, it is a book about the resilence of life and the inexorable fact that when someone dies, the rest of us have to keep on living without them. In my opinion this book should have been short-listed for the Booker but I understand from Scottish writers that cronyism amongst the English 'set' prevented it.

This is not a book as such but more of an extreme inward experience. Galloway's deeply personal,immensely self-indulgent and immediate language make the voice of Joy Stone one that we make our own. Her outlook stays with the reader long after the book has been set aside, as Galloway sets to describing the undescribable and bringing home to the reader those harmless idiosyncracies we all know so well, that can so easily spiral out of our control. A painfull, funny and educating experience.

I read this book when i was about 14.I have had depression since childhood and when I read It I was shocked It was like reading a story about my own feelings.Anyone who Is considering this book,buy it!I borrowed It from the library the first time I read It and I did not want to return It.You won't regret buying this book.Unless you've never been depressed in your life,this book will grab you and won't let go.