Tony Hogan Bought Me An Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma’ – review

Author Kerry Hudson. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

“Just write about what you know,” creative writing tutors tell us, and Hackney author Kerry Hudson is doing just that.

Her semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of Janie Ryan and her childhood growing up in council estates, bed and breakfasts and care homes across England and Scotland.

Janie narrates her own story and describes her life from the time when she was an all-knowing infant dragged unwillingly into a world of booze, fags and family feuds to her adolescence as a hardened and witty teenager.

The underlying tension lying dormant throughout arises from this question: can Janie hope to ever be able to escape the lot of the Aberdeen fishwives with their “feckless” men, and, also, will they let her?

The language is raw and visceral. Smells and senses are important and scratchy school jumpers, spam-like complexions, bodily functions and copious amounts of chip grease ooze from the pages of the book.

When swastika earring-wearing thug Tony becomes Janie’s temporary ‘da’, she narrates: “Tony smothered the life me and ma had built, a furry mould growing over a sweaty slab of cheese.”

Her disgust and anger manifests itself in the grotesqueness of the metaphor.

Hudson’s graphic imagery is the easy stuff in this hard-to-swallow debut. A witness to her mother’s suffering of violent domestic abuse and depression, often hungry and cold, Janie is exposed to hard drugs and alcohol from birth and bullied horrifically as a teenager.

The novel is saved from being a misery-fest by its sharp and self-depreciating wit and flashes of hope. Similar in style to the writing of Roddy Doyle or Frank McCourt, Tony Hogan depicts tough times but is told in a spirited and positive light.

With the far shorter title of Thirst, Kerry’s second novel will be out next July.

It is about a girl who is sex trafficked to England from Siberia and her relationship with a troubled young man she meets in Hackney.

Tony Hogan Bought me an Ice Cream Float Before he Stole my Ma’ by Kerry Hudson is published by Chatto and Windus. ISBN: 978-0701186395 RRP 12.99