No Definition Required: Janice Galloway on Jellyfish

Janice Galloway decides to meet with The Skinny in the café of Glasgow’s CCA, at the bar. She insists on buying the drinks while tasking us with finding a table. After introductions – "Where are you from? What do you do?" She later admits she likes to pin people down on first meeting them – Galloway shakes her head, suggests that we need to find somewhere quieter, and disappears for a moment, only to return with a member of staff, charmed into opening up the empty cinema. In here it is silent – utterly – and, as we pull seats up to the table at the front of the auditorium, it feels slightly surreal, as though this conversation is being playing to an invisible audience.

We are here to discuss Jellyfish, 'a short book of short stories' and Galloway’s first book of fiction since 2009’s Collected Stories. The slim, vividly yellow volume, follows the more recent All Made Up, published as a memoir in 2012. From the outset, however, Galloway demonstrates a reluctance to accept categories: "Here we go, I’m afraid I’m going to split hairs right from the start." She explains: "When I hand something in I call it a book. And they say, 'Clearly it’s...' Clearly! It means don’t argue, the word 'clearly', that’s what it means. They decided to call it [All Made Up] memoir and I touted it at interviews as anti-memoir, because, classically, the definition of a memoir is ‘I remember this’, and I don’t remember everything. It doesn’t mean it’s lies, it doesn’t mean it’s made up, it means it’s where most of us keep our memory. It’s all stories, as far as I’m concerned and your job is to tell the story interestingly and not be dull."

Struck by a thought, Galloway leans forward. "Muriel Spark, whom I idolised; she wrote something called Curriculum Vitae – have you read it? She said, ‘I have resolved to write nothing in this book simply because I remember it.’ One of the chapters is called Bread… and the chapter after that is called Butter… and the chapter after that is called Jam… and they are literally about these things. It’s terrible! I’ve never, since reading that book, wanted to call anything factual. When I got to the end I thought, 'She’s pissing you about, this is a game.' I don’t know if it was, but we do tend to think up excuses for our heroes and heroines, and possibly there isn’t one."

Despite shrugging off attempts to classify her work, Galloway accepts with pragmatic good humour that "basically you are under the care of your publisher, who’s been good enough to publish you." Jellyfish is dedicated in part to ‘folk who publish, buy and write short stories’. It’s Galloway’s fourth collection and she explains her affection for the form: "Thank God I’m writing short stories. You get to the end of them quicker, and you feel a sense of achievement much quicker. And I love putting them together, and I love toying with ideas between stories and seeing how one story bounces off another – it’s totally different to how chapters bounce. A completely different ball game. It’s playing with the reader and saying ‘I know you’re out there’. I mean..." She chuckles. "...There’s no point me writing this if you’re not out there. It’s a form of companionability, I think, writing short stories. In a short story there’s more of an assurance that people will find all the things hidden under stones – because there are fewer stones."

Jellyfish reflects and responds to the observation by David Lodge, that "literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life’s the other way round," and the collection of short stories vividly evokes the joys, the sorrows and the stark truths of sex and love and parenthood. Galloway strips away some of our comforting illusions, and confronts us with our weaknesses, our fears and our fallibility. But there is hope too in this Pandora’s treasure trove.

"You’re just trying to get a state of mind across," Galloway asserts. "That to me is the essence of what creativity is – and anything’s allowed." She recalls, aged 16, finding a Stevie Smith book in a school cupboard that nobody ever used. "And I thought, these are funny and weird and sad at the same time. How perfect is that? Because that’s what we are… and when I found out she was a woman I managed to track down the complete works… which I still have, it’s all covered in coffee and jam and fingerprints… and tears. She just blew me away because she can tell you the most awful thing, and then she’ll tell you something trivial like, ‘Aren’t cats fun?’ to make up for it… and that’s basically life. I learned a lot from Stevie."

Love – and especially parental love – in Jellyfish is often tinged with fear, loss and helplessness. "It wasn’t until I became a mother that I realised that you could love anything that much," Galloway recalls. "I was very much lost as a child… I’d always felt somehow subhuman, other. But I remember being in prenatal, I felt that I belonged, with all these other women looking like barrage balloons, and thinking, 'We’re all in something together.'" Aged 34, she gave birth to her son: "I thought I was going to explode with excitement. There isn’t somebody there one minute, and then there’s somebody there! It’s better than Santa! It’s just the most dramatic exciting thing."

In a quieter tone, she reflects that, "Nothing, nothing – nothing can prepare you. Nothing prepares you for the weirdness of being left alone with a total stranger and not having the faintest idea, really, how you look after them or what they want. It’s difficult and it’s heartbreaking because you love them so much. You know you’re bluffing and guessing all the time. I think that’s what makes it hard. But dear God, I mean, there’s things that are hard for absolutely no good reason, so if it’s going to be hard, that’s a good kind of hard to have. I’m sounding like Stevie Smith now – token, here’s a sweet! That will make it okay. And oddly enough, it does! A barley sugar makes everything better."

Galloway is intelligent, humorous and possessed of a warm generosity, answering questions thoughtfully and leading us along with her through fascinating tangents ("I ramble a lot, have you noticed that? You must hone me in if I start wandering too far").  In conversation she is playful and intimate in turn. "A readership is something you almost never get to meet! You run away with a book and you – do you read in bed? – yes – you see, people read in bed… they actually curl up – often naked, in my lurid imagination – and they’re having an intimate experience with something you’ve written down, that you know nothing about. It’s quite odd, that." Then after a pause: "...So it’s always a thrill when someone comes up and says, 'You know what I thought that was?' And I would never dream of correcting them! Never! Because I’m not the authority – these are words, I don’t own them. You take them, you’re meant to take them. I might think I’ve made a fairy castle, and you might think it’s a spaceship, and if I’ve given you those Lego bricks you can build that – you’re right. You paid the money, you’re allowed to do what you like with it. And people make different constructions. Now isn’t that more fun than telling somebody everything? Isn’t it?"