Books like All Made Up

Original review:I actively dislike novels about writers’ schooldays, about their early inurement to bullying through their book-munching habits, how reading Virgil at twelve opened them up to a world of bookish intelligence while all the other losers languished in meaningless office drudgery. All this while the great author sits ruminating from his study in Morocco, sipping sherry and having his toes waxed. Now: this isn’t a novel but a memoir, so demurely sidesteps the first charge, commencing to calmly commit all the offences stated in the remaining clauses—Galloway licks up Latin, bites down Bartók, huffs on Homer. All this while her vicious, resentful sister systematically tries to crush her spirits at every turn, and her daft old mother trots out strangleable platitudes from her backward auld peasant mooth. The sequel to This is Not About Me, this book covers Janice’s high school period—periods, boys, motorbikes, classical music and all-out tribal warfare—and the prose has a lyrical, stoical voice that for me failed to mask the heartbreaking bleakness of this adolescence, the grainy old photo of this bygone era: an era best surrendered to historical indifference. If you’re Scottish, give this a bodyswerve. Additional: This book left me sullen and moody, with an additional heart-heaviness I can’t quite understand. Here’s a numerical attempt to explicate this feeling. 1) This memoir takes place in a bleak coastal town of Saltcoats in the late 1960s and 1970s. I used to take holidays in a bleak beach area called Blackness (pronounced Black Ness), so perhaps the deeply evoked sense of dreary, empty silence touched me through some embedded recall of this childhood time. 2) I am a sap for nostalgia. I pine for events that happened several days ago, my heart gets heavy about the passing of time and the fleetingness of life. This memoir might simply have tweaked the clitoris of my nostalgia. 3) The world Galloway describes made me lament on how my own teenage years paled in comparison, since we shared working class upbringings (albeit hers in viler circumstances, bleaker times, with far worse people), and she bloomed into a fighting toreador, while I limped along slowly through long days of torpor and social anxiety. 4) I always wish my own past went differently, despite Woody Allen’s epithet about doing the same things over again. I love a regret I can gnaw on for a week. 5) This was simply an extremely powerful book that got under my skin. She should get an Oscar.