.…….is to keep breathing – a novel she wrote in 1989.
Galloway is Scottish. In this book she uses short sentences. My review does too.
Joy is breaking up.
Her name is ironic.
She is a shell because she feels so empty inside.
How can she fill the void.
Tony is her boss and wants to take her to see Greyhound races.
He buys her champagne.
He only wants to have sex with her.
She lets him.
To refuse is too much trouble.
Joy Stone is 27.
Her sister Myra is 50.
They are not close in age or in spirit.
Myra only makes her feel more oppressed.
Joy is afraid of her flesh and blood.
Their mother walked into the sea.
She didn’t die right away but it was the beginning of the end.
While on holiday in Spain, Joy’s lover Michael drowned in a freak accident.
This is the source of the void Joy feels .
Everything has a beginning.
The circumstances of the accident are vague.
The events come to her as bleak snap shots she half blanks out.
She wants desperately to understand.
Joy does not speak Spanish.
An outsider of that culture and the remoteness remains when she returns home.
Michael was still technically married when he died.
The separation had not been finalised.
His spurned wife can mourn more legitimately than Joy.
Her grief must be more private.
Joy teaches drama.
Or did.
She cannot continue this work.
Dr. Stead refers her to a psychiatric hospital.
The doctors there have no names, only numbers.
The drugs she takes stop her dreaming.
“I have to take the pills because they make me accept”.
Joy’s best friend Marianne lives in America.
Marianne sends postcards and photographs.
Joy takes a Polaroid picture of herself but the image is just a blur.
She sends it anyway.
It’s not how she looks but it is how she feels.
Joy struggles to fill the days.
“I have a place on the sandwich rota”.
She thinks she may be pregnant.
At least that’s what a doctor tells her.
Is it psychology or nature that’s stopping her blood cycle?
The father would be David.
David and Joy liked each other for no particular reason.
She has a scan to check.
It shows nothing.
“I had nothing inside me”.
She asks Doctor Three if she should have counselling or go into analysis.
Doctor Three thinks both are ridiculous ideas.
She should do what the other patients do.
Other patients stop asking questions.
They accept how things must be.
But acceptance is no substitute for real grieving.
Doctor Two gave her a book called ‘Courage and Bereavement’.
She read it in two hours and it made her cry.
It was “like watching Bambi” .
Mental illness cannot be cured by cliches.
Time is a concept not a healer.
Like God.
In spite of her situation Joy will survive and start over.
The truth of this is implicit but no less certain.
This is a novel about the loss of self but the need to stay alive.
It takes us on a journey to the brink of the abyss that is madness.
It ends just short of falling.
