Before My Actual Heart Breaks: Tish Delaney

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Mary starts off at sixteen in this book and we experience with her her good times, her life and the wonderful conversations between her Aunt Eileen. How comes there’s something wrong with this book if you, you the nastiest stars giver, gave it 4 stars? That’s a miracle!” If you enjoy a meaty solid story full of intense raw emotions, hardship faced, and 25 years of being together with someone but.......as I started with the quote from this book, I’m going to end with the quote from it too....

I laughed, I cried, I felt every emotion under the sun. This book is a masterpiece and I’m so glad that we crossed paths. Definitely in my top reads of all time. Her wanting a better relationship with her Father, I felt the urge there. Her mother and her relationship was not ideal, far from it. All this is in the book.

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I generally don’t like to make comparisons between books, but this felt like a gorgeously Irish version of Betty by Tiffany McDaniels with its vivid ensemble of family and its intricate, sometimes ugly dynamics, and in the way that subjects so painful can still survive and go onto bloom into something pretty great. For this reason, I don’t think the reader can trust any of the epiphanies our protagonist has. The sex she has aged 16, after which she becomes pregnant, is, to her “the first chance I’ve had in sixteen years to do what I want”. It should feel transgressive and feminist, but it doesn’t quite come off. The man who takes her virginity is older and in a position of relative power. In the Republic, it would be classed as statutory rape. This isn’t just a love story, it’s so much more! It’s a story of personal growth, of grappling with your past demons, childhood trauma, of your hopes, wishes and desires, of understanding and ultimately, self actualisation. But through that frustration, you begin to realise that this is what can happen; when the person that you are is shaped in your formative years, and if that place is physically and emotionally abusive and you watch as all who have supported you escape to begin their own recovery. When the country you live in, perpetuates and exacerbates that fear of violence that you learned at home; what does it take for someone to understand that they deserve happiness, that they are surrounded by love, that they are safe, it is just that they cannot see it... I would like to add Tish Delaney to the wealth of amazingly talented Irish writers that we have out there today.

Beautifully bleak, we follow Mary from the moment her older sister, Kathleen, moves away, taking with her the safety blanket she had wrapped around Mary as the buffer between her and their bitter and twisted mother. Then her innocent and charming narration ages through the years, from whimsy adolescence, to the thoughts of a scorned young woman, exiled by society. This book was a bit of a curate's egg for me. The first part dealing with Mary's childhood before her forced marriage at sixteen was superb. It really captured growing up with a toxic, narcissistic mother in Northern Ireland and resonated so much with my own life down to her mother spelling out regpungant words (to her) such as T.R.A.M.P and the superior holier than thou attitude, belittling and sense of never being good enough or of getting things right. It started to fall apart for me when Mary gets pregnant after her first sexual encounter (how predictable) and is hastly married off to the farmer down the road who is the rumoured who has recently returned heartbroken from that there London (and is himself the rumoured illigetimate offspring of a priest). But you can’t stop thinking about her and about the life she told you about and you start feeling a weird kind of nostalgia and you wish her story was written down so you could revisit it whenever you feel lonely.This is in many ways a familiar story but it is told in such a fresh, entertaining, funny and moving way, it felt like I was reading something brand new.' RODDY DOYLE The politics, personal, family, and cultural, of Ireland during The Troubles and it's fallout was at the forefront of the majority of the story. It impacted the relationships within the story and displayed the tensions in Northern Ireland as a whole and within nuclear families. It provided a band of elastic which Delaney stretched to breaking point before releasing only to stretch again. Once the band broke so did much of the tension Delaney had managed to toy with, and so the final half of the book felt a little lost. So, I’m giving this book 4 stars now that I finished it even though, it doesn’t feel like a 4 stars. But it my heart, it feels like it. Reading this book kind of felt like breakthrough therapy for me. I genuinely laughed, I genuinely cried and I’ll be genuinely surprised if another book affects me so deeply this year. This is a very good debut which becomes absolutely engrossing as Mary battles so many demons and constructs walls around herself. She has little sense of self worth and it’s beyond sad that she misses out on so much joy although I do want to shake her sometimes as she drowns in self pity! All the characters are extremely well depicted, there are some to love (John, his mother Bridie and Mary’s friend Lizzie etc) and some to heartily dislike such as Mary’s hard as nails mother Sadie who is most certainly at the root of Mary’s issues. Yes, Siree Bob, she sure is. I love how that little phrase repeats itself through the book!

It’s told mostly from a Mary, and the dialogue is written in a different format without speech bubbles but easily followed.

On the outside it feels baffling that two people who marry and spend their lives together can be virtual strangers to each other, yet this is the reality of many arranged relationships. Tish Delaney movingly depicts the life of one such Northern Irish woman in her debut novel “Before My Actual Heart Breaks”. Mary Rattigan once dreamed of moving far away and being with her sweetheart, but those aspirations were dashed by the reality of her circumstances. When we meet her at the beginning of this novel it's 2007. She's estranged from her husband and her five children have gone away. Now there's nothing to bind her to the rural farm she's been confined to since she was sixteen but she finds herself questioning the heady plans she made in her youth and finds it difficult to articulate what she now desires. Over the course of the novel we discover the story of how she got to this point as well as a vivid depiction of The Troubles as experienced by a Catholic girl growing up in the 1970s who felt the alarming proximity of this long-term and bloody conflict. It's a story that powerfully represents the tension between the life you wanted and the life you've lived. I’m not going to tell you what this book is about (there are people who tell books better than me and also, Google it) but I will tell you what was wrong with this one. Delaney’s true skill here was displaying the complex relationships and emotions experienced by every character in the novel. Everything is vividly raw, no one understands what others are holding close to them, each person has a purpose and will strive for that without sharing their feelings or dreams. It’s a heartbreaking portrayal of how deeply miscommunication can wound us, how sometimes trauma can cause irreparable damage, and how the walls we build can be strong enough to ruin us. This book takes you by the chokehold. I felt paralysed by Mary’s sense of worthlessness and horrified by her acceptance of the hardships life had handed her; the love and protection she was so cruelly denied. I felt frustrated, too, as her relationship with John Johns stuttered along barely, hoping to shake some sense into them both to just communicate.

The couple never speak to each other and it is not explained until near the end of the book why he agreed to marry Mary (although it is easy to guess, if not the most logical or realistic thing to do). They go onto to have five children, have a torrid but closeted in the bedroom sex life and despite working together on the farm never speak to one another and seem to show no kindness to each other either, which I just couldn't quite believe. They get married in 1982,I do know that many young people still had "shotgun" marriages at that point in time in Northern Ireland but don't know of anyone who married someone not the father of the child. At that point I was openly living with my boyfriend, all be it in the city as were many friends. Things weren't quite as oppressive sexually as made out, the book should have been set in the 60's or 70's if it wanted to have the sexual mores it recounts. Many girls crossed the water for an abortion in Scotland or England (as they still have to), often their parents were the most religious and most vocally against abortion in public, but this is never considered as an option for Mary. Once I got to the halfway mark the book seemed to split in two. The first half a promise that the second didn't seem to keep. Her mother forces Mary into a shotgun marriage with a local farmer, John, who lives with his mother. She becomes a farmer's wife, and in the next 25 years goes on to have 5 children, and a strangely weird relationship with John that is characterised by a strong physical, heavily sexually active relations behind closed doors in the bedroom and one of an estranged silence between the two of them in every sphere of life elsewhere, despite their close proximity to each other. In a emotionally charged and heartbreaking narrative, Mary lives through the years as a traumatised woman, growing up in many areas, yet so understandably emotionally stunted in others. It would be all too easy to superficially attribute her feelings towards John as those of hate, things are so much more complicated and can she actually face the truth of what lies between them?I wanted to be the one he was paying attention to, just once. Sometimes it felt as if the fabric of the sofa had grown over me and no one had noticed. This book is about Mary Rattigan, a young Catholic girl trying to navigate growing up in 1970s Northern Ireland, where the “Troubles [rumble] constantly overhead like a thunderstorm”. She has a bully for a mother, a gormless father and six siblings. At school she shows potential, and dreams she will one day “grow wings and fly” – find a way to emigrate to England or the US and build a better life for herself. Mary Rattigan's tale is utterly heartbreaking, but Delaney's style is full of the dark humour that can only come from a place of experience; to take what has been lived, to step outside it and lighten it somehow, to make it more palatable. This is author Tish Delaneys debut novel, and it is wonderful! Written with beautiful, lyrical prose, I was captivated throughout the whole journey. My actual heart did break, many times.