Big Girl Small Town by Michelle Gallen
An insightful, absorbing snapshot into a lonely life in a dead-end town in Northern Ireland. The author’s dark humor betrays, if not a love of life, at least an endorsement of making the most of it.
Majella is 27 years old and lives in a small, rural, (fictional) town in Northern Ireland called Aghybogey that is stumbling in aftermath of the Troubles in the 90s. The town was shut off from the south and its economy decimated. Unemployment hovers around 90%. Crime is rampant. We learn that Majella’s elderly grandmother was just beaten to death in her home.
Majella’s mother is a whiny, self-absorbed alcoholic who never recovered from the disappearance of Majella’s father more than a decade ago. Given her father’s involvement in the Irish Republican Army it is unclear whether he was killed in a terrorist incident, arrested by the police, or if he simply could no longer bear his wife’s juvenile selfishness.
Majella dropped out of school and works full time at the town’s fast food joint, serving fried fish and sausages to the locals, each of whom she knows by name - including the local prostitutes and a swath of functioning alcoholics. She manages to eek some pleasure out of life with creature comforts – casual sex, television and the occasional mouthful of prescription pills.
Despite this litany of sorrows, this book should not be dismissed as a depressing portrait of a lonely life. The author absorbs us into the reality of Majella’s world with such dry wit that this book is a pleasure to read. Majella is the sort of subtly hardy striver who manages to find scraps of joy in it all. Though many crumble in the face of bad luck and hard times, some people keep going, keep doing their best. What could be less depressing than that?
Similar to Angela’s Ashes, this book uses the kind of dark wit and sarcasm that makes an otherwise utterly bleak story deeply engaging and moving.
Michelle Gallen has a second novel coming out in June 2022 called Factory Girls. Putting it at the top of my TBR.