Before My Actual Heart Breaks

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Later in the book there is an unambiguous rape scene, but it comes as a surprise to the reader and appears to exist for narrative closure more than anything. It feels gratuitous and implausible. So now Mary is in her adult life, and the lessons, hardship and things she’s been through has made her into the woman she is now.

It gets into you. Every word of my book has come out of my childhood and teenage years.The next book is set in Ireland as well; when I write about Ireland, it just flows.’ The character Bridie I absolutely came to adore as I did John John but he exasperated me at times as so did Mary although I fully understood why they acted in such a way, and when we find out about john johns past that was so touching.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. 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. Speaking to Tish on Zoom, I comment on a painting depicting what she describes as the famous Alderney breakwater, an architectural world wonder.Alderney is also home to writer Rachel Abbott, for whom Tish works. Involved in the Alderney writers’ festival, Tish will feature as this year’s debut author.

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? She fulfils her mother’s prophesy by getting pregnant at 16. Refusing to reveal the father she is branded a tramp, forced to leave school and marry a neighbour. Mary slips into a cage of self-pity ‘like a boned corset to hold myself together and keep him out’—the ‘him’ in this case being John Johns, her new husband. My heart broke for the families of Northern Ireland in the 80s, for the innocent child with an evil mother and pushover father, for the irreplaceable loss of loved ones, for the dreams that suddenly get flushed down the drain and for the longing of a love you so desperately need but never quite feel deserving of.

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). A friend writing for Mills and Boon once told Tish that readers ‘love to love the characters’. ‘It’s liberating writing the man of your dreams, like John Johns—nice, quiet, and randy.’