LoveReading Says
Candid, comic and razor sharp raw, Marise Gaughan’s Trouble is an extraordinary coming of age memoir like nothing else. Her voice is incredibly powerful, and her recovery from her father’s suicide and the ensuing inferno of self-destruction is nothing but defiantly life-affirming.
As a child, and growing up, Marise was incredibly close to her alcoholic father: “My dad gets me, because I am a carbon copy of him. We are made from the same stuff, so he always says.” At the same time, “I’m not stupid; I am almost eleven years old, so I can see he is a flawed adult, but I also know he loves me very much”.
As Marise moves through her teenage years, it becomes clearer that her dad’s battle with alcoholism meant, “he didn’t notice that there was another demon in the room, slowly eating away at him. When mental illness goes unchecked for that length of time, it can eventually destroy the person you love. And it happens so gradually you can never put your finger on it. Slowly, without you realizing, until suddenly, they’re gone.” In Marise’s case, her dad was gone when he committed suicide when she was 23. She’d been there when he tried to kill himself ten years earlier.
The aftermath of this loss sees Marise flee to New York, raging with self-destructive impulses that eventually see her in a psych ward in California, swaying on the abyss. Her journey to understand her father, to understand herself, and to find forgiveness and self-forgiveness is astonishing.
Joanne Owen
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Trouble Synopsis
Marise was nine when she first realised there was trouble, 14 when her Dad tried to end it all, and 23 when he finally succeeded.
In a turmoil of conflicting emotions she runs, leaving behind Dublin and her Catholic girlhood and fleeing to New York, where she gets into a messy relationship with an older comedian who she idolises and who tells her she's special - until she's not. With a trail of sex, self-destruction and a near miss with Scientology in her back pocket, eventually she finds herself in a California psych ward, a young woman imploding.
As she retells her unravelling from child to adult, Marise strips back her identity and her relationship with her father, layer by layer, until she finally starts to understand how to live with him, years after he has gone.
Written beautifully, with a caustic sense of humour and brutal honesty, Trouble is one of the most powerful coming-of-age memoirs in recent years.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781913183998 |
| Publication date: |
2nd March 2023 |
| Author: |
Marise Gaughan |
| Publisher: |
Monoray an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
288 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Biographies & Autobiographies
|
| Other Genres: |
|
Marise Gaughan Press Reviews
Raw, brutal and life-affirming - Marise has written a hugely important book that is as entertaining as it is illuminating. - Sara Pascoe
I couldn't put this down. A brave, honest, witty, new Irish voice that has a very bright future ahead of her. - Jade Jordan
Holy cow. I finished it and cried my eyes out. An incredible, beautifully written memoir about humanity, heartbreak and hope. - Lou Sanders
Gripping, funny and heart-wrenchingly relatable. Every time I turned the page I hoped it wouldn't be the last. - Lily O'Farrell, Vulgadrawings
Where so much writing about mental illness is riddled with po-faced earnestness and cliche, Marise Gaughan's take no prisoners approach to craziness, sex and Catholic girlhood is spit-your-tea-out funny.' - Fern Brady
Disarming in its candour, hilarious and harrowing in its depictions of a life shaped by trauma and addiction, Trouble is so much more than a memoir of survival. It is a picaresque journey through the stages of grief; an intimate epic of self-sabotage and self-forgiveness; a no-holds-barred report from the lip of the abyss. How glad I am that Gaughan stepped away in time. Her voice, at once wry, profane and heartfelt, is a gift. She observes with a mordant wit the ways we deceive ourselves in the name of our desires, and reminds us that we are not defined by our pasts, but by the small steps we take every day towards our ideal selves. - Stephen Kelman, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Pigeon English
An unflinching account of a young woman's alternating attempts to survive her father's suicide - or die from it. Marise Gaughan writes with heart-rending precision of the dynamics between fathers and daughters, as well as the still more troubling sexual one between older men and damaged young women. This is a knife-sharp and defiant story of recovery. - Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep
Marise is a Brillo pad of a writer, spikey and essential. - Alison Spittle
Gaughan's humour is dark, biting, and painfully honest, but it is in the moments when she is being gentler to herself that her words are at their most transcendent. - Irish Independent
Trouble is an outstanding memoir, a text on addiction that gets to the heart of its implicit trauma and complications. Gaughan has a remarkable voice, self-assured yet vulnerable, frank to a staggering degree - and likeable even in her darkest moments. - The Business Post
Blistering...an outstanding memoir - Sunday Business Post
An outstanding text on addiction and girlhood, equal parts vulnerable and witty - The Business Post
Addictive, exhilarating and raw - Daisy Buchanan, author of 'Insatiable'
