G alloway, J anice

Janice Galloway, born in 1955, was brought up in Saltcoats, Ayrshire, by her mother, whose life was a constant struggle after she left her destructive, drunken husband. Galloway's childhood was dominated by a much older sister who returned, having left her own husband and child, to tyrannize the household. Yet, love of reading and music provided freedoms in the midst of emotional and material deprivations. At her secondary school, Ardrossan Academy, she was encouraged intellectually and musically by a charismatic teacher, Ken Hetherington. She studied music and English at Glasgow University and taught in Ayrshire for 10 years before The Trick is to Keep Breathing kickstarted her writing career in 1990. Since then Galloway has made herself into an impressively professional woman of letters, indeed of more than letters for her repertoire includes short stories; poems; theatrical, operatic, and sculptural collaborations; editing and music reviewing, as well as four novels, The Trick, Foreign Parts, Clara and This Is Not About Me in which the various interests converge. Literary, visual, and musical experiments inform the techniques of the four long fictions; and the long and short fictions assist each other, since Galloway often suggests that women's lives are best represented as a series of short stories or vignettes with repeated epiphanies or clarifications, rather than as plot‐driven toward definitive closure. She exploits the visual possibilities of the page, and the structure of Clara roughly follows Robert Schumann's song cycle Frauen Liebe und Leben (Woman's Life and Love). Galloway's determination to transform rather than be limited by conventions, whether literary, typographical, political, or sociological, characterizes her feminism which may, given the depressing nature of some her subject matter, at times seem down, yet is never out. Galloway refuses to be limited by fixed categories – Scottish novelist, Glasgow novelist, woman novelist. In various interviews she insists that she simply gets on with it – if critics find schools and patterns that is their affair. She admits the significance for her work of Alasdair Gray and Marguerite Duras, admires Catherine Carswell and Jessie Kesson, but insists that nothing that a writer reads or experiences is ever wasted.