The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing is one of the most painfully convincing portrayals of depression I have read. After her lover dies while they are holidaying in Spain, Joy Stone returns to an empty Ayrshire house and tries to keep functioning through work, cleaning, drinking and rigid control over food.

What stayed with me was how completely Galloway places us inside Joy’s mind. Lists, magazine extracts, broken sentences and words scattered across the page capture thoughts she cannot organise or escape. Her observations can be sharply funny, but the humour only makes her loneliness feel more human.

This is a difficult novel, particularly in its portrayal of grief, disordered eating and psychiatric care, yet it never reduces Joy to an illness. Bleak, inventive and deeply compassionate, it finds something quietly hopeful in the smallest decision to continue.