- Hardcover: 236 pages
- Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (May 1994)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1564780465
- ISBN-13: 978-1564780461
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 13.7 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 249 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,718,804 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Drama teacher Joy Stone is losing her grip. In a captivating story of the onset and evolution of depression, her problems accumulate, denial activates, and food becomes a major player. Through the wit and irony that is gaining international applause, Galloway crafts the chicken-or-egg dilemma of life in our times and being depressed. Yet even through her growing obsessions and the metamorphoses of family and friends into suspicious characters, Galloway's main character and the reader find that the trick in living rests with the simplest things.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Meticulously observed, agonizing and funny, this unconventional account of clinical depression marks the novelistic debut of the author of the praised short-story collection Blood . Drama teacher Joy Stone has become severely depressed following the death of her married lover. Surrounded by his effects in the house they briefly shared, she can't summon the will to work or even to eat, nor can she benefit from the concern of her friends. Interspersed flashbacks to the day of her lover's death have a sensual, physical quality that contrasts vividly with Joy's present detachment. The nature of Joy's illness--and its accurate depiction, captured partly by an unusual spacing of the text in addition to journal entries, interviews and impressionistic passages--makes her a difficult choice for a narrator: readers may lose patience with her lassitude or be unwilling to put in the time needed to decipher the basic plot. However, the ironic, self-mocking tone that ultimately saves Joy also saves the narrative. Faced with an impersonal health care system, her sense of the ridiculous takes over, and with it self-reliance. Galloway delivers a thoughtful, witty chronicle of depression and potential renewal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting,
By
This review is from: The Trick Is to Keep Breathing: A Novel (Paperback)
My interest in the band "Garbage" led me to this book - its title was used by them to create a chillingly magnificent song on their second CD. I found the book itself to be one of the most creative and compelling works I read this year. The story it tells gets under your skin to such a point that I don't recommend it for those already depressed. For the rest of us, it is a chilling look inside a sympathetic character, a young woman dancing around the border between sanity and madness. She knows she is on the verge of losing it all, and knows she is not getting the kind of help she needs from anyone - least of all the mediocre medical personnel who see her as just one more casefile. Yet she's unable to shake the helplessness and displays the lack of will to take control of her own life which is so often found in the insane and/or suicidal. Galloway makes extremely skilled use of innovative page layouts and even unexpected graphics to really show us her character's imbalanced view of the world. We see through her eyes.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Painful, but So Beautiful,
By
This review is from: The Trick Is to Keep Breathing: A Novel (Paperback)
This novel is painful to read because Janice Galloway's descriptions of Joy Stone's feelings and experiences are so accurate. We've all felt the way Joy feels at some time or another. The accuracy is so startling that at times it's tempting to forget that this is fiction, and not a non-fiction depression narrative, like "The Beast" or "Girl, Interrupted." Perhaps this is why Galloway added the subtitle, "A Novel." This novel is truly inspiring; it's refreshing to read a novel about depression which maintains a sense of humor. Galloway uses a number of unusual narrative techniques, including spontaneously breaking into dialogues when she's on the phone or talking to doctors, and putting comments in the margins to represent the thoughts that we all have, but don't always acknowledge, even to ourselves. This is a novel I'm sure I'll go back to again and again, because even though the subject matter is depressing and painful, this novel is so beautifully written and the ending is uplifting. This novel will be with me for quite some time.
5.0 out of 5 stars
An extreme inward experience for both character and reader.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Trick Is to Keep Breathing: A Novel (Paperback)
This is not a book as such but more of an extreme inward experience. Galloway's deeply personal,immensely self-indulgent and immediate language make the voice of Joy Stone one that we make our own. Her outlook stays with the reader long after the book has been set aside, as Galloway sets to describing the undescribable and bringing home to the reader those harmless idiosyncracies we all know so well, that can so easily spiral out of our control. A painfull, funny and educating experience.
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