11 Sep 2011 04:38:02
Galloway's first volume of memoir, This Is Not About Me, was published in 2008 and contained innumerable moments of cruelty. Janice's father comes home in a foul mood one day and tosses the family's supper (a pot of stew) into the garden. Janice's mother eventually leaves him, taking the young Janice with her. Janice's sister Cora then leaves her own husband and moves in, bringing fear and tyranny. Every morning Cora "painted on eyebrows like gull-wings" before going out to work as a secretary, but when at home, she proves capable of setting fire to Janice's hair in a fit of pique. Their mother tries to kill herself but fails, and the book ends with 11-year-old Janice on the phone to the Samaritans, after yet another small but telling act of cruelty from Cora, leaving her "a sensitive plant with a memory like a packet of razor blades". That packet is reopened in All Made Up.
One review of the first book noted – quite astonishingly – that it was "as far from a misery memoir as it's possible to imagine". Reader, beware: moments of joy are few and far between in the teenage Janice's life as her story continues, and All Made Up opens with Cora (17 years her elder) headbutting her – not for the first time. "Mum didn't pursue what had happened for long," the narrator explains. "There was no point. Stuff just happened: Cora was handy." In fact, Cora is not just handy: she is an extraordinary creation. Complex, twisted and inscrutable, when she walks into a scene fireworks are never far away.
Late on in the book, poised between school and university, Janice is loaned an evening gown by a friend. She walks into the living-room to show off to her mother, but finds Cora there too, and as proud mother prepares to capture the moment with a camera, the elder sister throws a plate of stew (yes, stew again) over Janice and the frock. Is Cora simply too bad to be true? Is she more akin to the villain in a novel or play? The titles of both volumes are ambiguous. If This Is Not About Me was not about Janice, then was it really about Cora? Or does the title imply that there is imagination at play, that memories are being moulded to suit a novelist's view of the world? Does All Made Up refer to primping and preening, or making up after a disagreement, or is it hinting at a sustained fiction?
And does it matter?
Although This Is Not About Me was shortlisted for at least one autobiography award and won a non-fiction prize, the author refers to it on her own website as "anti-memoir". Throughout All Made Up the narrator seems able to recall screeds of dialogue between mother and daughters. Is this believable, or is there a level of playful artifice at work? Galloway perhaps gives a hint when she writes about a teacher who uses a doll to demonstrate the bathing of a baby to her class: "She may have pulled off an arm as well, but that might be embroidery after the fact. Whichever is truer, the uses of borax and bicarbonate of soda as stain removers seemed tame thereafter."
