I take extensive notes while I am reading, sometimes in my reading notebook, or an index card that doubles as a bookmark; notes on characters, story, quotes, ideas, words I want to look up. This is my routine, this is how I read. However, when reading Rachel Trezise‘s In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl recently, I didn’t take any notes. I read it in one sitting, and I couldn’t even bear to put the book down long enough to take a note of the page numbers I wanted to return to, instead I resorted to dog-earring the pages with passages I fell in love with – anything to avoid interrupting the luscious flow of Trezise’s powerful and lyrical prose.

Hendrefadog is a village with a population of five thousand. It seems since Dare pit closed unknown years before I was born there, unemployment had become a fashion which takes too long to die out. Like ski pants, and tennis shirts, clothes which are made popular by fashionable sports, but continue to be worn when sport has become unpopular, worn by middle-aged women who have never been skiing, or given as hand-me-downs to children who have never watched a game of tennis. Like middle-class families who refuse to smash tradition and all become doctors one after the other, Hendrefadog teenagers followed their parents to the dole queue, making us a notch lower than working-class. My generation, the products of unemployed parents, of divorce and downright poverty, tried desperately to find satisfaction in joyriding and class B drugs (which were barely affordable), cider-drinking in lanes, and underage sex.

Rebecca Trigianni is growing up in Wales, she idealizes her glamourous, alcoholic mother and is brutally raped by her step-father at the age of eleven. She is mostly neglected by her mother, and runs away with an older boyfriend at the age of fourteen immersing herself in a life of excesses and danger, until she is dragged back home and returns to school. She falls in love, takes a lot of drugs, gets her heart broken. She sees her rapist walk free. She becomes involved with an emotionally abusive boyfriend, and once that relationship ends Rebecca moves back in with her mother and her new boyfriend. It is only when caring for her dying grandmother that Rebecca realizes that despite everything that has happened to her, she still has her strength and determination, and that will enable her to survive.

Her story is powerful because it is told in her own voice, with all the impassioned urgency and emotional turmoil that involves. In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl isn’t so much about the story, although obviously that plays a huge part in how Rebecca sees the world and herself, but it is Trezise’s ability to convey the feelings of helplessness, loss and strength in Rebecca’s voice. Finally, a literary voice that echoes the sometimes manic energy of my own inner voice, the less than ideal surroundings and circumstance, the unromantic and honest portrayal of pain and heartbreak as utterly devastating. The description of the cultural and social landscape of the working class Welsh valley towns echo my own experience and feelings about where I grew up and live, the regular predictability, the helplessness and the need and the struggle to escape it, the trappings such an environment sets for its inhabitants. And all of this captured in brutal and lively writing.

I began to look at the place of my birth, growth and youth with double vision, one which looked down from above and saw through everyone and everything because I knew I could be bigger; and another vision at eye level which accepted these common, common people because I was afraid it was all I would ever be.
I always felt kind of like Alan Bennett, worrying whether I should be speaking properly or being myself, knowing too well that the difference between metropolitcan and provincial still exists. As his mother’s chance meeting with T.S. Eliot made him conscious of his working-class upbringing, my short visists to Nottingham city and Birmingham Bullring would perpetually remind me what a handicap it could be to grow up in a place like the Rhondda.
Before you had time to worry about what outsiders would think of your accent or your Welsh mannerisms, or your memories of quaint houses stuck together with walls so thin you could hear your neighbours having boring Rhondda missionary-position sex, you would have to worry about what your neighbours thought of you trying to get away from it.
I wanted so desperately to shatter the dreams of hometown people who only find respect for you if you give up the fight for originality. But if you stand out like a sore thumb, looking like you’re doing better than the next one, then someone will knock you down. How can you be the one to make the change in a place where nothing ever changes but the shoes?

The blunt pursuit of emotional honesty to herself and her readers, if not always for those in her life, makes Rebecca’s confessional voice one of the most convincing I’ve read in literature in a while, a deafening scream that refuses to go unheard. If my ramblings about In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl seem a little more fragmented than usual, I’m going to blame the lack of coherent notes. After reading Sixteen Shades of Crazy I thought I would just be keeping a casual eye out for more of Rachel Trezise’s work, but In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl has made me a Trezise devotee.