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www.janeygodley.co.uk
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autobiography
published 2nd June 2005
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(photograph by john
Book, 2005)
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I liked doing handstands, It made me dizzy but
I liked that feeling. Maybe my secrets and sore bits would disappear
if I were to stay like this. My big sister Ann pinched me on the knee:
“Janey, turn the right way up, eh?” – “Not yet.”
Sometimes I would only talk upside down. Sometimes I would talk in a
code only I knew. Sometimes out in the street I would kneel down and
scoop water from puddles with my hands coz I was thirsty but too scared
to go home and face what was there. An astounding dark memoir of murder, abuse and gangsters. Janey tells her unique life story. Brought up amid near-Dickensian squalour in the tough East End of Glasgow and sexually abused by her uncle, she married into a Glasgow criminal family as a teenager, exchanging one life of fear for another as she faced the murder of her mother, violence, religious sectarianism and a frightening family of in-laws. First-hand, Janey saw the gangland violence and met extraordinary characters within an enclosed and seldom-revealed Glasgow underworld. From the grim and far-from-Swinging 60s, to the discos of the 70s, to the tidal wave of heroin addiction which swept through and engulfed Glasgow's East End during the 1980s, Handstands in the Dark is an evocative, intimate and moving portrayal of a woman forced to fight every day for her family's future. |
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Janey Godley's troubled childhood is set to be a best-seller. The stand-up comedienne who uses her own life for her outrageously candid act, has been offered a book deal to tell all. And there's plenty to tell...
click to see full article: The Glaswegian
stand-up is now writing the story of her life before she came into comedy.
It will cover the murder of her mother, her abuse at the hands of her
uncle and the consequences of heroin abuse on those close to her. Godley turned
the experiences into a one-woman play, Point Of Yes, which she
performed at this year's Fringe. There it was seen by writer John Fleming,
who suggested it would make a good book. Godley told
Chortle: "I promptly sent stuff to Random House that I had written
about my past; they were very impressed at the content and story so
they offered me this book deal. I was amazed and stunned. Being a stand
up is everything to me but I tried new stuff this year and I became
a playwright and actor for the Fringe and ended up an author. It has
been a great learning curve for me and I am really looking forward to
getting on with the book. I do seem to have an abundance of weird life
anecdotes." Fleming, who
recently edited the collection Sit-Down Comedy, will be helping
Godley with the book. He said: "It is a fairly relentlessly horrific
life story, but told by a funny woman." The book is scheduled to be published by Random House's imprint Ebury Press in June 2005. |
A tale of sexual abuse, drugs, gangsters, murder, suicide and love. Writers' Guild of Great Britain Bulletin, November 2003 If it is anything like her act, it will make Angela's Ashes seem like The Famous Five. London Evening Standard, 11th December 2003 Godley's early life was tough...It looks like being a harrowing read. Daily Record, 13th February 2004 Somehow, the 42 year-old's natural resilience has seen her not only survive, but take positives from her harrowing experiences. Glasgow Evening Times, 1st March 2004 Handstands isn’t funny; it’s a serious memoir, covering the period of her dirt-poor childhood in Glasgow’s East End up until 1994. It does seem that Handstands will be a tear-jerker. |
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