There are diary entries, extracts from magazines, recipes and letters all jostling for position in the narrative.

This is cheering and helps me through another mouthful.Īs Joy spirals into a deeper and deeper depression, the book’s structure becomes more fragmentary, more fractured. If I get drunk enough, I won’t go to work tomorrow either. Gin tastes sweet and bitter at the same time, stripping down in clean lines, blooming like an acid flower in the pit of my stomach. She also begins to numb herself with drink: Food becomes a punishment tool, rather than a source of sustenance or even medicine, and she develops an eating disorder that leaves her painfully thin. Forster Award in 1994 and the Mind/Allen Lane Book Award in 1990, is a devastating portrait of what happens to someone when their grief cannot be publicly acknowledged.Īs the “other woman”, Joy must mourn in private and keep her thoughts - and her tears - to herself, but such a burden eats away at both her psychological and physical health. This claustrophobic story, which won the American Academy of the Arts E.M. Written in a series of fragments, often sharp, melancholy or bleakly funny, the book reflects the slow inward collapse of Joy Stone’s world as she struggles to make sense of all around her. Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing is a profoundly disturbing story about one woman’s mental breakdown following the death of her lover. Fiction – paperback Vintage 236 pages 1999.

Breathe by sarah crossan summary