‘Spit-your-tea-out funny.’ -Fern Brady
‘Raw, brutal and life-affirming’ -Sara Pascoe
‘Addictive, exhilarating and raw’ -Daisy Buchanan, author of Insatiable
‘Graphic, explicit, visceral’ –Irish Times
‘Blistering’ -Sunday Business Post
‘Transcendent’ –Irish Independent
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.
‘Raw, brutal and life-affirming’ -Sara Pascoe
‘Addictive, exhilarating and raw’ -Daisy Buchanan, author of Insatiable
‘Graphic, explicit, visceral’ –Irish Times
‘Blistering’ -Sunday Business Post
‘Transcendent’ –Irish Independent
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.
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Reviews
Raw, brutal and life-affirming - Marise has written a hugely important book that is as entertaining as it is illuminating.
I couldn't put this down. A brave, honest, witty, new Irish voice that has a very bright future ahead of her.
Holy cow. I finished it and cried my eyes out. An incredible, beautifully written memoir about humanity, heartbreak and hope.
Gripping, funny and heart-wrenchingly relatable. Every time I turned the page I hoped it wouldn't be the last.
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.'
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.
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.
Marise is a Brillo pad of a writer, spikey and essential.
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.
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.
Blistering...an outstanding memoir
An outstanding text on addiction and girlhood, equal parts vulnerable and witty
Addictive, exhilarating and raw