Before My Actual Heart Breaks: Tish Delaney

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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. Now, five children, twenty-five years, an end to the bombs and bullets, enough whiskey to sink a ship and endless wakes and sandwich teas later, Mary's alone. She's learned plenty of hard lessons and missed a hundred steps towards the life she'd always hoped for. 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. 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.

Delaney's writing is a beautiful wave flowing lyrically . . . A touching tale of how one woman survives a tough beginning to eventually end up exactly where her heart belongs.' ANNE GRIFFIN, author of When All is Said It’s told mostly from a Mary, and the dialogue is written in a different format without speech bubbles but easily followed. 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 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).

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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. 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. Mary and John are both emotionally crippled and unable to talk to each other. Mary, as a result of the treatment she received from her mother and John from events in his past, which are not fully revealed to Mary (and the reader) until late in the book. There were times when I wanted to shake them both for their obtuseness, particularly Mary who stubbornly refused to reach out to John, missing so many opportunities to voice what she was feeling. John’s mother Bridie is a wonderful character, kind and gentle, creating a safe haven for Mary after she was thrown out of her family, and providing the glue to hold Mary and John together as their family grows. 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. But I couldn’t DNF it. Yes a potential DNFed book that is a 4 stars reading! I’m weird! I’m going to tell you how this book felt like and I really hope that it will make sense to you (and to me).

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? 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.... Set amidst The Troubles of Northern Ireland in the 70s through to early 2000s we follow Mary Rattigan through her and her family’s religious, political and personal journeys. 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. Her older sister leaves, and she reflects that will leave her all alone in the dark in the bedroom on The Hill. No electricity remains burning at night for silly children who should know there is only one thing to fear-losing Gods love and His Good Holy Mother. So Mary was raised with thoughts and her own emotional worries.

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. 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. As we follow Mary on her life’s journey and the era of time in 1970’s we see how things were so different then.

Overall, this is a very impressive and emotionally raw debut from Tish Delaney and I greatly look forward to reading more of her work in future. To an extent, this book is a love story but by no means is it your typical run of the mill romance. It’s a love story about dreams, hopes, ambitions, family that aren’t blood and so much more. I just can’t actually comprehend how utterly beautiful this book is?? Tish Delaney is an incredibly talented author indeed. Here is where the marriage might mimic the Troubles. Mary's realisation – "Had we ever tried talking to each other I might have known that he was the one person who could understand, the one who'd already been on that lonely, bloodied road" – reads like the beginnings of a peace process. This is a sad, sad story of the ignorance and prejudice of its time. A girl who loses everything for a few minutes of unexpected joy and then sees all her plans for life evaporate. It's a tale of two people who just can't talk to each other or admit to their feelings. It's dripping with so much repression and so many words unspoken that the reader will want to shake the pair of them into some sense.

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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. 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. 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...

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 DOYLESo many religious references and that pissed me off. At the beginning it was comprehensible because it put me into the context of what was going on and how the MC was who she was. But still, pissed me off. That’s my preference, though. This is Northern Ireland around 1970’s. When the bombing, the IRA, Protestants and Catholic’s were head on. 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.