The Woman Who Walked Into Doors - Roddy Doyle

It’s all down to that first-person narration: Paula, in her head, in her hellhole of a marriage, in her Dublin vernacular.
 
Because she knows how to tell her story, straight out, it’s incredibly alive with undiluted truth and emotion and pain even as she jokes about it.
 
“Something had gone wrong.
I fell.
I’d been too near him; he hadn’t realised.
He’d only been warning me.
He didn’t know his own strength.
He had things on his mind.
Anything.
It wouldn’t happen again. Anything. It wouldn’t happen again. How could it? It had been a mistake. We’d laugh about it later.”
 
This is domestic physical and emotional abuse. This is exactly how it happens, what it looks like and how it feels. Paula is too emotionally invested, too scared, too bewildered to leave Charlo. There are no safeguards in these suburbs and so she takes it, again and again. 
 
This, too, is alcoholism: how it happens, what it looks like... When she goes to the shed and necks the wine, it is a killer of a description.
 
Brutally eloquent, pitch black with humour, brilliantly written. Hats off to Roddy Doyle. He doesn’t know it (or me), but I have a double connection with him, via Fighting Words and Fish Publishing.