“All Made Up” by Janice Galloway is the second installation of an autobiography of the author’s early life, and this one focuses on her teenage and young adult years, forming her identity.
The first edition, “This is not about me”, recalls her unconventional and often bizarrely comic upbringing in Saltcoats, Ardrossan, by her single mother and her semi-present and volatile older sister Cora. Galloway became familiar with family conflict and strife – and the family curse of feeling shame – very early on, but proved herself resilient enough to simply keep her head down, and in a book most of the time, as a means of coping.
For the most part, this continues into her adolescence; crammed into a tiny council house with her mother and sister for constant company, their clashes in personality are amplified even more, because if anything, she becomes even more “bookish” than before, in direct contrast to the other women in the family who are more at home with the TV always on, and usually an argument going on. Chided for trying to learn things which are “above” the family all the time – “who do you think you are?” is a common refrain – she continues nonetheless, and by the time she reaches Ardrossan Academy, she acquires more outlets for her inner life.
In attending a school which seemed to be equally progressive in its curriculum and quality of teaching, young Janice seems to flourish, especially, in her learning of music (joining an orchestra) and Latin (which she claims can lend all the more meaning to almost everything in life) and appears to be in short, a star pupil with a promising future.
However, this being the early seventies, when society was becoming more permissive towards young people than ever before, Janice too would become more rebellious and daring in turn, doing things which were frowned upon a generation before, such as having boyfriends, skipping school, and more controversially, harbouring an ambition to become a composer or a scholar in Latin, which girls still “didn’t do” in that day.
Despite all the trouble – from family and otherwise – that is flung her way, she evidently never loses interest in her studying and her strong love of learning. In any case, the sharpness of her memory – to retain so much minute detail of what had happened decades before writing – has to be nothing short of remarkable. The writer who Galloway would later become can be seen in the conversational yet elegantly written tone which helps to form this portrait of complicated teenage life.
