Before My Actual Heart Breaks: Tish Delaney

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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!

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. The growth of Mary, the maturing of Mary and the development of love and intense emotion brought tears to my eyes at the end. 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.

For this reason, I don’t think the reader can trust any of the epiphanies our protagonist has. The sex she has aged 16, after which she becomes pregnant, is, to her “the first chance I’ve had in sixteen years to do what I want”. It should feel transgressive and feminist, but it doesn’t quite come off. The man who takes her virginity is older and in a position of relative power. In the Republic, it would be classed as statutory rape. 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. 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. 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. How comes there’s something wrong with this book if you, you the nastiest stars giver, gave it 4 stars? That’s a miracle!”

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....

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. 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. With beautifully written prose, this is a compelling read, particularly if you enjoy Irish literature and strong character driven novels. 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. 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.

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.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

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). 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.

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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. 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. 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... So 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.