Before My Actual Heart Breaks: Tish Delaney

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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. 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. 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.

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? 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. 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. This book hooked me from the start… the story of Mary Rattigans abuse at the hands of her mother is raw and painful but at the early stage of the book she still clings to hope that she will leave Tyrone and her mother like her siblings have done. A teenage pregnancy and an inexplicable shotgun wedding changed all her plans. Ireland was and is a very religious Country governed a lot by “their Priest or Vicar. We see this when Mary is told by her Mother that she had better pray before bed as she can’t keep the ghosts away.

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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. The growth of Mary, the maturing of Mary and the development of love and intense emotion brought tears to my eyes at the end. Despite how good her husband is to both her and her daughter, she still treats him with disdain and blames him for her predicament. At times I wanted to shout at her character for being so selfish but as a product of a damaged childhood, she hadn’t dealt with her own emotional issues and in many ways was still childlike in her behaviour.

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. 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. 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.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.... 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 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 would like to add Tish Delaney to the wealth of amazingly talented Irish writers that we have out there today. Mary Rattigan's tale is utterly heartbreaking, but Delaney's style is full of the dark humour that can only come from a place of experience; to take what has been lived, to step outside it and lighten it somehow, to make it more palatable. 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. 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.

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... 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 Northern Ireland around 1970’s. When the bombing, the IRA, Protestants and Catholic’s were head on.