Janice Galloway on moving on from her stalker anguish

She's dipping biscotti into her cappuccino in the cafe of the pristine new foyer of the Theatre Royal in Glasgow. She stops and says nothing. It seems to me these are constant themes in her writing, I continue - The Trick is to Keep Breathing (about a young teacher's breakdown) and her memoir This Is Not About Me.

Jellyfish is a series of reflections on an observation made by author David Lodge that literature is about "having sex and not much about having children whereas life is the other way round". It is Galloway's first original short story collection for 10 years and her first book since All Made Up in 2012.

The stories explore children, parents, abortion and can be startling, surreal, even visceral. If the themes remain constant, does she feel her writing has changed? "I hope it has changed," she says in her distinctive Ayrshire accent. "I'm constantly assessing and changing my mind, but I don't notice. As a writer it's being like a performer: it's your job to do something effective. You're serving something that is not you."

Inevitably I ask the all-too-obvious question of whether Jellyfish is autobiographical. It is easy to assume that, as many do with much of her previous work. The title story, for example, describes a mother on a day out at the beach with her young son who she is desperate to keep safe. There's another about a psychiatric ward. And the last story, Distance, sees a mother sending her child away to live in Canada, the better to protect him. A sense of being watched seems to permeate the stories. So I can't help wondering.

In the three years since her last book, Galloway, 60, has endured the emotional trauma of two court cases following a five-year campaign of harassment of her and her family by her former partner, the concert pianist Graeme McNaught, who is the father of her son James, now 23 and living in London.

This week, Galloway won a court order banning her ex-lover from contacting her for 10 years. McNaught had twice walked free from court on charges of harassing Galloway and she launched a civil action. Galloway said: "I am pleased, and hugely relieved. A grant of order for 10 years is unusual, I believe, and allows time for Mr McNaught to put in place some useful measures against it happening again."

McNaught, of Mount Vernon, Glasgow, walked free from trials in October last year and April this year after concerns were raised over his mental health. In April a jury took less than an hour to acquit him on the grounds of insanity. McNaught will now face criminal proceedings and possible jail time if he breaks the order.

When I ask if the experience has found its way into her work, she bristles. "That's a strange question. These external things - and they are external - do not necessarily enter the creative process. In fact they shouldn't."

I press on and ask her about her feelings towards McNaught. "This is about a strange mismatch. Graeme is technically brilliant but he has no idea of what he's doing. He's out and about, still playing piano. Being multifaceted, that's a human being. Our whole psyche is put together by things we don't even know ourselves."

Does she feel changed by the experience? "I don't know and I don't care. By this age we're not challenged so much by events or other people as by what we've learned. I would be very disappointed to think I haven't learned enough to look after myself. We're all vulnerable. You can be the type who worries about being run over by a bus. For that to inhabit your life is something you have to work on."

She challenges the misconception that the author is at the centre of a work.

"I do find the idea very strange. We're not; it's the reader who's the centre. It's not about our life. Jesus. What would Shakespeare have done if it's all about our life?"

She is reluctant to discuss the situation regarding McNaught any further, partly because "it's not about my work. It's a total sideshow". She is dismayed that there are more Google alerts about these two court cases than anything else she's done. "The media focus on the cult of personality and celebrity is unbelievable. Give me political coverage any day."

We move on to safer ground. Music, and in particular opera, are further leitmotifs throughout the stories. There is Puccini's Madam Butterfly, Bizet's Carmen, Mozart's The Magic Flute, David Bowie, and John Shirley Quirk singing Benjamin Britten plays while a woman narrator is burning down a woman's house.

Galloway studied music and English at Glasgow University and her husband is the opera singer Jonathan May, currently with Scottish Opera. They live in Uddingston with her lifelong friend Alison Cameron in a house they co-own.

Galloway's father was an alcoholic, and her mother left him before he died when she was five. She and her sister lived with their mother in a room above a doctor's surgery in Saltcoats, where she was a cleaner earning next to nothing. She was prone to taking overdoses, and died after walking into the sea at Saltcoats.

Her sister Nora (Cora in This Is Not Me) was 17 years older than her, and returned to the family home one day after she abandoned her husband and children. She says she was spiteful towards her younger sister and Galloway was left with a childhood full of bad memories. Galloway has suffered depression and in her youth bouts of heavy drinking but music was her saviour.

She says: "Music saved my life. I had a wonderful music teacher at Ardrossan Academy, Ken Heatherington. He taught me to grab other people's gifts. That was a life-affirming, wonderful thing."

Throughout our interview she cites poet Stevie Smith and artist Alison Watt, along with Virginia Woolf and Kafka and Norman McCaig, as her own gift-givers.

Her favourite music is Benjamin Britten sung by Shirley Quirk. "What an astonishing voice, so controlled. You fall in love with someone who's not like you. And Janet Baker is so controlled. Then David Bowie lets the whole thing out. That's what matters. Finding stuff that's life-affirming. Life's too short for stuff that isn't. That's why I want a restraining order. That's why I get cross with the media because I'm not finding it easy to get.

"If I get scared, I hold onto a life-affirming thing. That's what I have done with my life, turning it into stories. Not making stories out of my life. The important thing is to offer something to someone else. I should not enter it at all. I can give you something, and hope you make something out of it."

Writing out of, rather than about, herself, is Galloway's gift. While she concedes that life gives the writer material from which they learn things, she says she couldn't be a writer if she obsessed about the minutiae of life. "We're not bound by things that happen. Hellish things happen to people and they emerge. We're not controlled by memories you might have inherited from family."

One particularly unsettling story, Turned, about a wee girl falling down a pit in her mother's rose garden, and the presence of a father, I found inexplicably unsettling. "I'm there to give you possibilities and directions," is all she says. "With Turned I was writing down an extremely vivid dream. It's about not really knowing who your parents are and finding they're not who you thought they were. There's a mystery about adults, there's something quite threatening about those people. It could simply be, what am I going to turn into? Am I like them? When you hit 55 and there's your mother in the mirror. It's both horrifying and reassuring at the same time."

Another, Drugs and Rock and Roll, is about women in a psychiatric ward, some of whom are suffering the effects of multiple abortions. It took Galloway seven years to complete, and she says: "That was a bitch to write because I kept changing things. I'm preternaturally insecure. You'd have to be brain dead if you didn't want to change things and tinker and footer. Norman McCaig said a poem is never finished, only abandoned. Even now I change words when I read Clara."

There's no sex in the title of this one. "Lots of these women have had implied sex," she explains. "That's why I agree with David Lodge. Sex is not central to life, it's an optional extra. What is 50 Shades all about? Is this real sex? Real sex makes babies. How we fetishise it is beyond me."

Fifty Shades of Grey was, of course, written by a woman. Galloway is annoyed that the question of only writing about one's own life tends to be asked more of women than men. "There's a whole school of male critique of women's work that believes women can only write about their own bodies and their own lives because they are in thrall to them.

"When Frankenstein was first published anonymously in 1818 with a preface by Percy Bysshe Shelley, most people assumed he'd written it himself. When people discovered Mary Shelley had written it at age 16, they assumed it was about her own life, but Frankenstein relates to everybody.

"So Drugs and Rock and Roll is not as simple as 'I've had an abortion'. Only one person wrote Frankenstein."

The author VS Naipaul claimed there is no female author, not even Jane Austen, whom he considers his equal, because women are too sentimental. Galloway says: "He basically supports the argument which is saying women are somehow mentally less capable of being great writers because of their (supposed) life experiences. It's unbelievable."

I hear what she's saying and I get it. Basically, that's me well and truly telt.

Jellyfish, by Janice Galloway, is published by Freight Books at £12.99 on June 22, 2015.