MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)The title might suggest a tight, tidy structure but this is a big, busy book, replete with footnotes ... When Gadsby reveals she was molested repeatedly from the age of 11 by \'an upstanding citizen\' and then raped in her early 20s, these devastating times are dealt with with remarkable brevity. She does not want to \'prioritise my abuse in the telling of my story, because it was not a luxury I could afford at the time that it was happening\'. This can leave a strange sense that the focus is in the wrong places. Pages are devoted to stories of dogs and bikes and broken arms, whereas hugely impactful events that shape her psyche and her work are dealt with in a sentence ... While there is real merit in this deep exploration of a complex work and its creator, it’s unlikely the memoir will have the same mass appeal as Nanette itself.
Roddy Doyle
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)As with so much of Doyle’s work, Love is heavy on dialogue. So when the narrative shifts away from the often-fraught conversation between Davy and Joe and into Davy’s past, it can feel like a reprieve ... In the devastating final pages, all the hard drinking of the night gives way to an extraordinary tenderness ... Throughout, Doyle imbues the ordinary moment with a certain grace; moving exchanges with taxi drivers, a homeless couple sharing a paperback, a barman standing looking at his phone in the passage between the bar and the lounge. At the very least, anyone who is longing for the quiet comfort of \'a clean well-lighted place\' will find some consolation here ... an extraordinary book in which very little happens. But just as music is said to lie in the silence between the notes, it is a masterful study in all that goes unsaid.
Emma Jane Unsworth
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)Jenny’s character fits within the long literary tradition of The Messy Woman which is in fact the secret history of, whisper it, most women ... And the hunger for this sort of character is not waning ... Reading this book, I thought about Fleabag; the neuroses, the joy, the messiness – all the things women don’t say ... This is also the story of Jenny’s own relationship to the idea of being a mother ... The writing about maternal longing is devastatingly perceptive – Jenny is surrounded by doubt ... Unsworth never shies away from all the blood and bondage of female biology, the animal of us ... And no one can put a laugh out loud smut right up beside poetry the way Unsworth can.
