Memoir as a genre is enjoying enormous popularity these days, and comes in many sub-genres, focusing variously on illness, grief, divorce, childhood and mental health, among many other themes.
John McKenna’s latest ticks a few of the boxes. The spine is his own life, from childhood in the 1950s onwards, but while he inevitably plays a key role, the theme of family and what it can do to you predominates. He explores his connection to his father and his brother, Jarlath – the former died in 2000, and the latter in 2012. “After your death, I was lost.” Jarlath, 10 years older than the author, was his lynchpin, although he was away from home for most of the author’s life. John occupied the position of an only child, living with his parents in Castledermot - the village which anyone who listens to Sunday Miscellany knows well, from John’s frequent evocations of life there.
The Sunday Miscellany Castledermot usually comes across as a fascinating place, where all kinds of surprising but generally heart-warming adventures occur. The picture we get in the memoir is also vivid, but dark, and all credit to McKenna for describing the deep anxiety he suffered throughout his childhood, thanks to the endless quarrelling of his parents: “Chalk and cheese”, as Jarlath sums them up. They were good parents in most ways, but their son’s conclusion appears to be that they should have parted.
The only time he felt comfortable at home was when Jarlath was there, and the memoir portrays an extraordinarily loving relationship between the two brothers, which hardly ends even with Jarlath’s death, since John continues to think of him, to dream of him, and to write to him – analysing the emotional history of their family. Without an ounce of sentimentality he traces a history of grief over three generations that has shaped his personality.
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The memoir is composed with subtle artistry, in short chapters, variously concerned with Father, Son or – mostly - Ghost Brother. It is fiercely intelligent, unsparingly frank, and heartbreaking. Needless to say the writing is wry, lyrical, and perfect – exactly what one expects of MacKenna, one of our best writers.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has written two memoirs, Twelve Thousand Days (Blackstaff 2018) and Fáínne Geal an Lae (Cló Iar Chonacht 2023).
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