One thing that creative writing students should always be told, I reckon, is not to use their own life in their first book. For one thing, you still won't know, even when you've written it, whether you are capable of inventing things. For another, this stuff is often by far the best material you will ever have at your disposal, so save it up until you have the skill and wisdom to use it well. And thirdly: maybe it's better to wait for your loathsome, miserable and culpably heartless family to die before producing your child's-eye version of events?

Luckily, the Scottish writer Janice Galloway took absolutely no notice of this excellent reasoning. Her first novel, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1990), was a brilliant autobiographical novel, which rightfully won a number of prizes. Eighteen years later, however, she has produced an extraordinarily vivid and compelling memoir of a painful and impoverished childhood, topped off by yet another perfectly chosen title. “You think everything is about you,” her elder sister Cora would shout at her, when she was 10. Like many an intelligent child destined to be a writer, the infant Janice absorbed the blows, observed their source, committed details to memory, and waited for life to improve. Her trick was to keep breathing. But one thing she was sure of, even by the age of 11. All the household psychodrama was not, in any way, “about her”. If she would only disappear, in fact, they'd be really happy. And that's what makes it so sad.

This is a hard book to write about, mainly because to catalogue the episodes of violence, injustice, cruelty and wilful neglect suffered by the infant Janice would give an impression of a much lesser work - one of those pity-me books with an out-of-focus poppet on the front and a title that's a whispered plea for mercy: “Pleathe Don't Thtwike Me, Daddy, I'm Only Vewy Thmall.” But there is nothing evasive in the courageous way that Galloway writes the book, and there's no getting round the fact that there was a great deal wrong with the loveless way she was raised. If seven therapists with seven mops swept it for half a year - well, they'd give up, wouldn't they, saying it was hopeless. She was born in 1956 to a mother of 40, and the unpleasant story she was told was that the pregnancy was confused with menopause, otherwise something would have been done. Her father (whom Janice unhappily resembled) was violent and feckless. All the damage in these people's lives had, clearly, already been done a considerable time before she came along.

But now here she was, and when Janice was four, her mother removed her from their council home (and presumably harm's way), to live in a tiny one-roomed sanctuary above a GPs' surgery. It felt safe. But then Cora, aged 21, joined them from Glasgow - and for the reader, the words “fire” and “frying pan” spring instantly to mind. A glamorous, looming chain-smoker who was also selfish, arrogant, idle and capricious, Cora had savage and disproportionate reflexes: she would lash out, threaten, set fire to her sister's hair, lock her in wardrobes, and so on. It adds nothing to the cheerfulness of this story, incidentally, that Galloway was born and grew up in Saltcoats, on the Ayrshire coast. The adjective “driech” is not actually used (Scottish meteorological term for slit-your-own-throat grey and drizzly), but driech conditions are what Saltcoats is principally known for.

What makes this a great book is the sheer skill of a writer who, from earliest days, was “a sensitive plant with a memory like a packet of razor blades”. If you want to remember, vividly, the sensation of an outside lavatory, daily flushed with bleach so that its walls and floor are never dry, or playing with plasticine, or PE when you were five (lying on your back, cycling your legs in the air), or the simple joy of holding the coloured part of a Quality Street toffee wrapper up to your eye at Christmas to get a gold-tinted version of reality - well, it's all here. What this book is about is a child's capacity for noticing things, despite being beneath notice herself. A record player came into the home, and the three of them (Mother, Cora, Janice) sat “rapt in the pauses while the needle arm went gently up and down like a boat at sea”. She acquired a cast-off scooter: “The bumps on its footrest were rubbed black and the rubber on the handlebars was crumbly.” The book is almost rigid with references to types of cheap sweets. (Although, to nit-pick slightly, I don't think Cadbury's Creme Eggs were around as early as 1961.)

What Galloway remembers best, however, is her strategy for getting by: “I said nothing”; “I didn't speak”; “Telling anyone wouldn't help”; “I was good at being quiet. It was something at which I excelled.” Having learnt such a useful life skill, she is rightly put out when, suddenly, at school, she is required to act like a child: to run around and make a noise. Unable to do this, she finds herself in trouble, and it seems unfair. Her talent for singing, however, gains her some credit.

She can croon songs from the wireless, such as Elvis Presley's Wooden Heart (very aptly). But when a teacher tells her she has a good voice, she is flummoxed. She quickly calculates the safest way to respond. To agree would be cocky, but to ignore a compliment is rude. “Treading a line that seemed thinner in all directions, I fell back on what I knew best and said nothing at all. If it went on long enough, she might just get fed up with me and let the whole thing go.”

It is quite a trick to write about such stuff without self-pity, but Galloway manages triumphantly, mainly because This Is Not About Me really isn't. It has seemed odd to write about “Janice” for the purposes of review: she is not yet a person in this book, just a consciousness, which is part of the point. When, in the final pages, she calls for help and gives her name to a stranger on the phone, it is powerfully upsetting. Is it possible she was Cora's baby? Would this explain everything? After all, she is aware of being “stuffed with lies”. But in some ways, it doesn't matter: ultimately this would still always be “about Cora and mum; mum and Cora”. The cover photograph of her sitting wedged awkwardly between big sister and big mother is something a reader of this book will turn to again and again. It is so obvious that this child is in the way. She could be airbrushed out, you can't help thinking. She could be airbrushed out and you wouldn't even notice a gap.

This Is Not About Me by Janice Galloway
Granta £16.99 pp341

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