Resumen de A Good girl is hard to find: The politics of Janice Galloway's The trick is to keep breathing

Javier Delgado Delgado

• It is the aim of the present paper to study and analyse the set of deconatructi-ve strategies shown in the contemporary Scottish novel The Trick is to keep breat-hing by the young author Janice Galloway. Firstly, we focus on the techiniques the main character/narrator, Joy Stone, uses to exxpose and sybvert the inner power relations established between her and the dominant discourses and institutions. The latter are embodied in charaters who occupy positions of power such as doctors, priests, and her bosses at the school and the box-office. The discourses under scru-tiny vary from popular women's magazines to self-help manuals and maxims. Se-condly. we analyse how the main body ofi the text thwarts any appeal to authority through ambiguity, self-contradiction and unreliability.