All Made Up, By Janice Galloway

The second volume of Janice Galloway's autobiography is a joy to read despite the episodes of violent bullying it portrays so explicitly

Janice Galloway: A joy to read

Janice Galloway's previous volume of autobiography, This is Not About Me, an account of her childhood in small-town Scotland, was described in The Times as "a literary, not a misery, memoir".

While the suffering in This is Not About Me and this second instalment, All Made Up, is vividly, unsparingly described, it is not the focus or drive of the books.

The abuse Janice Galloway experiences at the hands of her older sister, Cora, is made explicit ("a crack like a toffee hammer hitting home and the bridge of my nose singing with cold, dense pain") and is viscerally shocking. However, the incidents are not set pieces, nor the core of the book. They are horrible episodes which happen suddenly, often inexplicably, but just as quickly are finished, and hurriedly smoothed over by Janice's mother sending her out for ice cream.

To the child and adolescent Janice, abrupt violence is just another facet of her existence, and is hardly given more attention than night-time reveries over the fate of Yuri Gagarin, "his face smeared by console lights", the thrill of illicitly borrowing the goriest tomes from the library, "Spartacus, Caligula and Vlad the Impaler", and the sudden importance of pop culture awareness and effortless prettiness: "My blazer sprouted Bowie badges ... I slicked Sugar Frost Surprise on my lips." All Made Up is firmly in the literary rather than "misery" genre because what drives it is the brilliance of the prose and poetic assuredness of the voice, rather than the grimness of the subject matter.

All Made Up is strongly reminiscent of Andrea Ashworth's memoir Once in a House on Fire. Both feature an intelligent, watchful child in difficult circumstances, both of whom nonetheless focus on the beautiful detail in their surroundings, drinking in colours and sensation, and worshipping music and books. Similarly, both books have a constant, unsettling undertow, because of an unpredictable antagonist waiting to strike. In Once in a House on Fire, the threat to Andrea comes from her mother's violent boyfriends. For Janice in All Made Up, it is from Cora, the mercurial sister who, at 20, left a child and husband in Glasgow to move back in with her mother and five-year-old Janice in Saltcoats.

Cora is a contradictory force. She is a vicious thug, always ready to lash out physically or verbally if she detects a perceived slight, but she is also a figure who stands firm against the cultural orthodoxy of the time, who left her husband, who sleeps around, who makes the effort to look like a film star even while working as a secretary. The conflict is encapsulated in a passage in which 15-year-old Janice is enduring a grim family wedding, and her vindictive Aunt Kitty's needling. Cora is the one who, uncaring of opinion, rescues the situation by dismissing Kitty and telling her mother: "Let's you and me leave the old married ladies and trip the light fantastic."

Throughout All Made Up, Janice is reminded of how Cora attended the same high-flying secondary school, and, much like Janice, showed early promise and flair. She is both a threat to Janice and a cautionary example; someone whose energy and potential has gone nowhere, and so gets funnelled into spite.

One of the most striking features of the memoir's young narrator is her shyness and sensitivity. She can dissect a single statement by a teacher or parent to the point of exhaustion, before usually deciding, after agonising internal debate, to say nothing. This hesitancy, and being overwhelmed by all the unknown conventions and signals as a younger child, leads to speech therapy and threatened sessions with the school psychiatrist.

But when she is a teenager, this watchfulness begins to pay dividends, in her intelligent analysis of Macbeth or Pinter, in her ability with music, and in her enduring, intense friendships. This Is Not About Me stresses all the possibility which Janice's precocious intelligence represents, while All Made Up is about that potential beginning to be realised.

All Made Up could be criticised for repetitiveness. Galloway has a tendency to write rushing, lengthy lists, whether of iconic trios (the Blind Mice and Little Piggies, the Witches, the Fates and the Graces) or of news stories (stock market fluctuations and political debate, captains of industry and captains of ships). She has a fondness for taking the platitudes and clichés of family matriarchs – "too clever by half" or "rotten to the bone" – and peppering the text with them. It's a device which works well to establish voice but it is overused.

Mostly, however, the confiding, lulling, yarn-spinning style is a joy to read. The writing is an exuberant demonstration of how Galloway fulfilled and far exceeded the expectation placed on her by youthful promise. All Made Up is an excellent sequel; its verbal playfulness, folksiness and wry, hard-won humour are an antidote to the neurosis and cynicism that can often characterise autobiographical writing by the authors of fiction.

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