From her earliest years with a boozy, accident-prone father and a reluctantly pragmatic mother, Janice Galloway grew up as a watcher ' careful and vigilant. Then her parents' marriage broke up and mother and daughter moved to an attic above a doctor's surgery. When her big sister Cora returned home, with a steady stream of boyfriends, snappy dress sense and matching temper, evasion became a way of life.

This is a funny and telling book about the routine dependencies and confusions, hopes and triumphs of childhood; it is also a book about emergence, as, slowly, the beginnings of unsuspected rage pushed the silent girl towards her voice.

Janice Galloway is the author of five critically celebrated works of fiction and two memoirs. Her first novel, The Trick is it Keep Breathing, is now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, with a stage adaptation performed in Glasgow, Toronto and London; while her second book, Blood, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In August 2012 All Made Up, the sequel to This is not About Me, won Scottish Book of the Year award at Edinburgh Festival.