"Unflinchingly honest and whip-smart witty, this extraordinary coming-of-age memoir recounts a young woman’s survival of losing a loved one to suicide to find her way in the world."
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.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
| Other Genres: |
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.
Trouble features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Health & Fitness, Memoirs, Coping with / advice about mental health issues, Coping with / advice about suicidal thoughts and suicide of others, Coping with / advice about depression and other mood disorders, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Family and health, Coping with / advice about personal, social and health topics, Coping with / advice about death and bereavement
Trouble is available in Paperback, Hardback
Trouble was written by Marise Gaughan and published by Monoray an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group
Trouble has 288 pages
£8.99
