Observing her own childhood with detachment was the goal Janice Galloway set herself in her brilliant memoir This Is Not About Me, discovers Fiona McAuslan

There’s a temptation to read irony into the title of Janice Galloway’s newly published memoirs, This Is Not About Me. After all, who else can one write memoirs about but oneself? However, Galloway is adamant that her role in this powerful recollection of her childhood spent growing up in a poor Ayrshire town during the ’50s and ’60s is that of an observer. “I’m the most boring character in the book,” she says. “My job turned out to be watching these totally inexplicable people.”

The finely realised book is rich with texture, poignant minutiae and flashes of dark humour inspired by the childhood world she shared first with her casually aggressive alcoholic father and careworn but feisty mother; and subsequently her mother and grownup, bullying older sister, Cora.

As she recollects her father hurling a pot of stew over the garden fence in a drunken rage, her mother’s oft-expressed reluctance in bearing her (pregnant in her forties, she presumed the arrival of Galloway to be the onset of the menopause) and, at the age of five, being locked in a cupboard and taunted by Cora, what is most striking is the atmosphere of uncertainty, solitude and fearfulness that imbues Galloway’s prose.

Was it easy to write about something so painful? “I started very reluctantly,” says Galloway, who has won acclaim for novels such as Clara and The Trick Is To Keep Breathing. “In my twenties and thirties, what was immediately in front of me was what was interesting. I spent a long time avoiding my own past. I thought it was boring. It wasn’t until I was 43 that I had any interest in looking back.”

Her interest was sparked by observing her own young son and realising that his ability to experience life dovetailed with her own as he reached the age of her early memories.

“It started a series of trip wires. I had to work out whether to jump over them or set them off.” In letting the sparks fly, Galloway had to recapture memories that weren’t there. “I didn’t have the people to go back to and ask because my mother, father and sister were all dead.”

Accessing the past was like learning a new language. “I immersed myself in it, and as I did so I become better at reading it and understanding it. It was extraordinary how much came back when I started looking at photographs and studying people’s expressions. Eventually, I was able to remember the moment when a picture was taken and the memories filled in around that.”

Galloway’s claim to be the least interesting character is somewhat disingenuous. The actions of the child Janice might be few, but her vision of the world is captivating. She evokes with clarity her inability to fit in at playgroup and the safe-house corner shop where her mother worked, to which Janice could retreat from the rigours of her home life.

Despite this, it’s true that it’s scary Cora who illuminates the book with vampish glamour and sardonic domination (immortalised in the brilliant double entendre: ‘Cora was good at crosswords, the harder the better’).

A perennial question that arises when considering memoirs is the authenticity of any given recollection. “The book was based on my memories, but I’m acutely aware that the adults would have seen things differently,” says Galloway. She is, however, very clear about her central aim in the book, which was to give childhood a clear voice. “I’m terribly fond of kids. Kids see everything, but they know when to shut up and not make a point of it. I wanted to look at how much kids are affected by that process. It’s about the psychology of childhood.”

To create the necessary distance from her memories in order to represent them honestly, Galloway changed the names of family members: most noticeably, her sister Nora becomes Cora in the book.

“The very resonance of my sister’s [real] name makes me come up in goose bumps. It was a conscious decision about halfway through writing the book to change their names,” says Galloway, discussing the ‘weird psychological tricks’ she played on herself. “It also made me more affectionate towards them. I found out that I admired my mother and liked my sister more that I thought I did.”

The process of searching for lost remembrance was more bountiful than even Galloway herself expected. “I wanted to slow down all the wee videos running in my head and look at them, but I had no idea that I was going to be able to mine so much from my childhood. If something hasn’t been cathartic to write, it’s not much use.” This Is Not About Me is published by Granta.