Scottish comedian and actor Janey Godley is currently touring with a typically unsparing title, the Not Dead Yet tour. This is because she’s been battling cancer. It’s this sense of looking life (and death) directly in the eye that permeates throughout her comedy career and in this, her memoir, first published in 2005.
Born into poverty, Godley grew up in an alcoholic household in the East End of Glasgow in the sixties. Mum Annie was the stoical one; Dad Jim a tough character. There was sexual abuse too, in the hands of an uncle. Then, in an “out of the frying pan” scenario typical of abuse survivors, Godley married into a family of gangsters. But there is not one bit of self -pity here. It’s sadly an all too common story, and Godley is frank, lyrical and warm in her “nae bullshit’ approach, which makes the book all the more compelling, and heart breaking.
Don’t go expecting an Angela’s Ashes style misery memoir. This is far richer, far more complex than that. Godley writes as she speaks: forthright and raw. You can smell the smoke and taste the alcohol. It’s as tough as the city of Glasgow itself.
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