Before My Actual Heart Breaks: Tish Delaney

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It’s told mostly from a Mary, and the dialogue is written in a different format without speech bubbles but easily followed. Mary falls pregnant at the tender age of sixteen during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Having been brought up harshly and devoutly, an unmarried mother was something to be talked about within the chapel and the community alike. Mary’s mother, someone you’d be stupid be caught talking about in church or community, takes her own action to protect the reputation of the family, and to save her own face. 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 as a Catholic girl with a B.I.T.C.H. for a Mammy and a silent Daddy, things did not go as she and Lizzie Magee had planned. 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

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. 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. 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.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. 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. 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.

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. 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... 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. 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. 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.

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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. 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. 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 Northern Ireland around 1970’s. When the bombing, the IRA, Protestants and Catholic’s were head on. 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. Oh my goodness, such an apt title. I feel like my heart broke at least 5 times when reading this beautiful book. And I’d do it all over again! 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.Mary is bright, she has the drive and ability to fly away from her home; her abusive mammy and passive dada, the church and the petrifying violence of that time - but one mistake renders her powerless and her life is changed forever - she doesn't get that escape and is left to face her darkest fears 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. 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. I wanted to scream out, too, that Mary was just a child, coerced by a man who abused his authority - something regrettably overlooked in the book; wanted to wrap Mary in my arms and tell her she owed no one no part of her.

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. 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.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. 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). 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. 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. 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.