Handstands in the Dark [Hardcover]

"'When you're bored of comedians telling you things you know and the comfortable laughter of recognition, go and watch Janey Godley for a change. You don't know what it's like to be Janey Godley - she does. And she can tell you all about it with wit, spirit and a truly unique comic voice.' Dave Gorman"

A remarkably engaging and fluently written memoir of a life that makes the McCourt family look like the Von Trapps.

Genuinely compelling

Gothic biography... courageous

This is Janey's life story and it's gripping stuff! - FOUR STARS

I found myself laughing... and crying

It’s doubtful you’ll be able to choke back the tears

Exhilarating, uplifting and often extremely funny...Raw sincerity that gives her streetwise revelations such savage bite

From the first page... Janey Godley, a natural storyteller, has you in her grip

She is making waves with her hard-hitting autobiography

Janey Godley tells her unique life story. Brought up amid near-Dickensian squalor in the tough East End of Glasgow and sexually abused by her uncle, she married into a Glasgow criminal family as a teenager, then found herself having to cope with the murder of her mother, violence, religious sectarianism, abject poverty and a frightening family of in-laws. First-hand, Janey saw the gangland violence and met extraordinary characters within an enclosed and seldom-revealed Glasgow underworld. From the grim and far-from-Swinging 60s, to the discos of the 70s, to the tidal wave of heroin addiction which swept through and engulfed Glasgow's East End during the 1980s, Handstands in the Dark is an evocative, intimate and moving portrayal of a woman forced to fight every day for her family's future.

An astounding dark memoir of murder, abuse and gangsters

'I liked doing handstands. It made me dizzy but I liked that feeling. Maybe my secrets and sore bits would disappear if I were to stay like this. My big sister Ann pinched me on the knee: "Janey turn the right way up, eh?" -
"Not yet." Sometimes I would only talk upside down. Sometimes I would talk in a code only I knew. Sometimes out in the street I would scoop water from puddles coz I was thirsty but too scared to go home and face what was
there.'

In a small, crowded flat in the tough East End of Glasgow, Janey, her brothers, and her sister, live in poverty with their father, an educated,
hardworking but hard-drinking man; and their mother, addicted to pills, permanently in debt and struggling to cope with bouts of depression.And all the while, from an early age, Janey is being sexually abused by her uncle.

Handstands in the Dark is a tale of growing up and surviving under the most difficult of circumstances.

When her parents separate, Janey's mother seeks comfort, of sorts, with a man prone to psychotic violent outbursts and who, over time, becomes increasingly and frightenly dangerous.And, when, as a teenager, Janey marries the son of a notorious gangster, she finds herself immersed in an insular Glasgow
underworld that threatens to tear her and her family apart.

The story of Janey's everyday fight for her family's future will strike a chord with anyone who has ever struggled against adversity.

'I had a secret, one that I could only tell my dog, because my dog would listen and not tell anyone about me. About the family. It was the secret that I had been taught never to tell, the one story that would be held for the longest time.'

Janey Godley is a 42-year-old mother from Glasgow and something very different on the comedy circuit. She has performed stand-up all over the world and had her first play performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2003. This is her first book.