This Is Not About Me - Softcover

'Sublime prose and fierce honesty set it apart - Part of Galloway's skill in This is Not About Me is how she keeps a child's sense of bewilderment and secret understanding' -Telegraph'Blistering, terrifying, always moving' - Independent on Sunday'Galloway provides sentences blazing with light, a gorgeous draft of terror' Observer'Galloway takes her readers straight back into childhood's wincingly recognisable uncertainties, dislocations and disruptions. She had more of them than most - one of the most moving, yet completely unsentimental, accounts of growing up that you will ever read' - Scotsman'A literary, not a misery, memoir. There is mirth, and a Proustian attention to the sights, sounds and smells of the industrialized coast of Clydeside' - Sunday Times'On reluctantly closing the boards of this unforgettable memoir, the words A"first volumeA" are strangely comforting - a combination of Galloway's power and the fact that the wee girl done good make it so' - Scotland on Sunday'A dazzling book - Galloway is brilliant on the minute detail of childhood perception. She is also brave, funny, resilient and in spite of everything full of emotional generosity' - Daily Mail'A book unlike any other, in which Galloway has captured what it means to start to become yourself' - Guardian

From her earliest years with a boozy, accident-prone father and a reluctantly pragmatic mother, Janice Galloway's grew up as a watcher - careful and vigilant. Then her parents' marriage broke up and mother and daughter moved to an attic above a doctor's surgery. When her big sister Cora returned home, with her steady stream of boyfriends, snappy dress sense and matching temper, evasion became a way of life. This is a funny and telling book about the routine dependencies and confusions, hopes and triumphs of childhood; it is also a book about emergence, as, slowly, the beginnings of unsuspected rage pushed the silent girl towards her voice.