Janice Galloway: we all share utter fucking confusion

Scottish Libraries

A pair of too-heavy drawers hangs from a garden washing line in Saltcoats. Janet Galloway, mother of Janice, is propped upright in a foldaway chair, her bare arms extended as if she is expecting sun. She is wearing earrings and a necklace that might be pearl. A show of knees.

Her black short-sleeved dress could be her Sunday best. She is in her 20s, perhaps, but there is no date on the back of the photograph her daughter is showing me.

We are in a Glasgow café, and Janice Galloway is in killer boots. Black-and-white pictures poke out of a creased brown envelope, their yellowed edges frayed and damaged by time. In one, the nine-month-old Galloway sits for a studio portrait, her hair drawn up in a clump of curls. She can't walk yet but the expression on her face suggests she would like to.

Her mother has left the room: the infant is looking at the already-closed door, a little frightened. The present-day Janice Galloway is full of laughter, the small child turned woman. In one hand she holds a coffee, in another her former self.

This Is Not About Me is not the book Galloway intended to write. The story she had in mind was to be about other mothers, not hers, and other childhoods, not her own. In some ways, she says, the book wrote her, the headaches and nausea beginning long before she realised she was pregnant with the idea. The kicking-screaming result is a memoir, and a novel, that she prefers to call "just a book".

"I realised to my surprise that it was my mother I was writing about," she says. "As a writer, you just need to shift your head out the way and let whatever is rising subconsciously come out. It's a story about human nature. How you work out who you can trust, what you can trust, and the biggest question of all – what the hell is going on?"

The book covers Galloway's life from conception to the age of 12. The writing, like all of her writing, is pared down, chisel-perfect - noticeable in the first instance until it dissolves behind its subjects. Names have been changed, but not her own. Her mother, Janet, becomes Beth; her father, James, becomes Eddie.

Rebranding them was necessary to obtain the distance she needed, the feeling that these people were archetypes with wider currency. "What interests me is commonality," she says. "And what we all share is utter fucking confusion." She has written semi-fictionally before, in her award-winning novel on the life of Clara Schumann.

Galloway's sister Nora, in the book, is Cora - a single consonant changed, only two strokes away on the keyboard, a minor key played with Galloway's right hand instead of her left. Nora was born 17 years before Galloway, whose mother was 40 when she conceived her and mistook the pregnancy as a sign of "the change".

Abandoning her husband and son in her early 20s, Nora landed with Galloway and her mother in the boxroom they shared above a doctor's surgery in Saltcoats, the surrogate family home after her mother and father split. She describes Nora at one point as "beautiful, beautiful, beautiful", her hair dyed with the blue-black rinse that Elvis was rumoured to have used.

She would lock Galloway in wardrobes, bash her in the face, and, on one occasion, set fire to her hair. Often she threatened worse, typically in response to praise being lavished on her younger sister. Contact between the two was lost many years before Nora died of emphysema in 2000, their relationship in a state of disrepair.

"I only heard she was dead because one of her sons made diligent efforts to try to tell me, which he did through my publisher," she says. "We were never motivated to find each other." She died 20 years after the publication of Galloway's first novel, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, which she would have left on the shelves of the library.

"A friend of mine met Nora years down the line and she said I hear our Janice is writing for a paper', but whether she knew about my prose writing I'm not sure. It wouldn't have been very interesting for her. She didn't read books by women."

At one stage in the book she holds a hot spoon against Galloway's neck, causing a welt. Inevitably, she comes across as a baddy, but determinedly not as a bully. "She wasn't really in control of how she behaved," says Galloway. "It's only occurring to me now that Nora may have been suffering from some form of manic behaviour pattern. But certainly, she had her problems."

The envelope opens: another photograph. The five-year-old Galloway is at a family wedding with a bouquet of flowers and shiny sandals. Her proud, slightly bashful-looking father is behind her in a suit, his eyes on his daughter and not the camera.

His hand is cupped just behind her head, almost touching, but frozen at a distance for all eternity. Galloway's mother stands next to him with a fur hat, gloves and a handbag.

"Women in their 40s don't tend to look like this now," she says. "Bad dentistry, bad skincare. I'm clearly in the prized position of being a flowergirl – and I still have a taste for exotic footwear. He doesn't look well there," she says, examining her father. "He's got that west coast of Scotland boozy skin. He must have been dead within a year-and-a-half."

Galloway's father was a heavy drinker and died of "booze and fags", she thinks, after suffering three heart attacks in quick succession. But she's not sure. The details are half-remembered, misremembered, bent out of shape by lies and heavy truths. "I went to see him in hospital and he didn't look himself," she says. "He was the colour of the bedsheets, that's all I remember."

Following his death, the sisters and their mother moved back into the original family home in Saltcoats, where Galloway shared a bed with her mother until she was 16. She was fascinated by her grandmother, she says "which isn't to say that I liked her very much". Grandmother would scoop her glass eye out to scare Galloway, hiding behind doors to say boo. "She died in a fire," says Galloway.

"Nothing else was going to kill my Granny McBride. The women in my family were very forceful." The men, in contrast, were absent because of death and other endings. "We only watched men on the telly," she remembers. "I thought they only came behind glass. I had no idea you could actually unwrap one."

Galloway's chosen role in the matriarchy was to remain silent, to not cause trouble, and to observe. Much of her childhood was spent sitting on windowsills looking out at the world, feeling uncertain.

"I distinctly remember thinking that nobody connected with anybody," she says. "Everybody told lies, everybody was untrustworthy. There were horrible games going on all the time and you were just meant to join in with them." Such as when her father locked her mother out in the rain and her mother stood protesting in the garden.

"My father tried to get me to play draughts with him in the middle of the most awful, ghastly, domestic mess," she says. "I was only three and couldn't possibly have known how to play draughts, but it was almost like he made the metaphor of playing games literal."

The book was written in France, mostly, at the Hotel Chevillon, and fine-polished at the Jura Writer's Retreat – in both cases thanks to financial bursaries. She slides into a diatribe about the funding policy for arts in Scotland, with a warning not to crank her up on political topics. She won't stop talking, she insists, and "it's mostly bullshit".

The yin of her argument is balanced by the yang of her writerly existence, which comes in heavy dribs, occasional drabs. There must be something wrong with anyone who wants to sit down and write a book," she says. "Immersing their head in themselves when there's sky and trees and birds and Dragons' Den."

So why do it? Cod analysis would suggest that Galloway has some deep-rooted issues to work through. But then, who doesn't? She began psychotherapy two years ago: that's not why she writes, but "if your writing doesn't have a psychotherapeutic effect it's probably crap".

The real spur cuts deeper into her flesh. "If you feel you can't really talk to people then writing is the nerdiest way in the whole world to try and make friends," she says. Off the page she has never found herself very interesting.

She married Jonathan, a freelance opera singer, two years ago, but didn't tell anyone about the impending ceremony until a fortnight before it happened.

"It took me a long time to realise how uncommunicative I was except in writing," she says. "I think I've learned now that the little things are important – saying to somebody here's a tiny detail about me, and if that sparks off anything you would like to say, well.' I was always crap at that."

Her mother and sister would have been mortified had they been alive to read the new book, not because of the way she has rendered them, but because it reveals that "we were really skint. People had a great pride in those days and I think that's why my mother and sister got dressed up for these photographs – it was to look classier than they felt they actually were."

Because her mother died of a heart attack when Galloway was 26 she didn't get to know Galloway's son, James, who is now 16. The broken link between generations is a regret.

"My respect for my mother increased enormously when I ended up as a single parent myself and thought: Fuck me, this is really hard'," she says. "You only start to know what your parents were about when you get married and have children, or have children and get married in my case."

She describes parenthood as "the most life-changing, wonderful, fantastic, complicated thing ever in the world" – a re-education that began with a bump. "The first time I walked into a maternity class I thought: Oh, I belong with these people'," she says.

"They were saying intimate things to total strangers about their plumbing and what was happening with their sex lives. It was brilliant - a crash course in conversation."

Beyond James and Jonathan, she has no wider family to speak of. "I've met one of Nora's sons twice, but he has his own life and doesn't know who I am from a hole in the wall," she says.

"They didn't even know who she was from a hole in the wall, but I believe they got quite close when she was older."

Some of which will be the subject of her next book, she says, or the one after that. She lifts another photograph, grimaces slightly, puts it down. "The stuff you have to make sense of before you have anything to offer the world is what happened to you," she says.

"Once you know where you're standing, you're on firm enough ground to give something to everyone else."

First published in The Sunday Herald, 2008.