BOOK OF THE DAY: Come What May, By Dónal Óg Cusack, Penguin Ireland 266pp, €14.99
AT ONE point in his autobiography, Come What May, Dónal Óg Cusack writes: "This is an awkward enough one for a hurling story, and it's been an awkward enough one for this hurler – but it's my story."
Indeed, there is nothing awkward in his approach to the genre of memoir writing, as Cusack is well-accustomed to speaking out on controversial issues. His confidence with this form of public discourse around private life is reflected in the uncompromising manner in which he recounts the story of his life and career in a forthright style, with robust language and opinions throughout.
Cusack, assisted in the writing by Tom Humphries, tells the story of his childhood and adolescence, his close relationship with his family, and his pride and sense of identification with Cloyne, birthplace of that other hurling Cork legend, Christy Ring.
As he tells us: “I’m from Cloyne. I’m playing the only sport that matters in a village and a city and a county that is mad about that sport. Demented mad . . . To the world I live in, I’m a man’s man.” Central to his world is the nexus of male friendships both on and off the pitch and often, in the memoir, he draws on images and metaphors of warfare to describe his tactical moves as a hurler and as a key member of the Gaelic Players’ Association.
In many ways the book is written primarily for sports fans, with a self-portrait emerging of Cusack as a man undaunted by confrontation, physically tough and something of a rebel. For those of us unfamiliar with the conflicts in Cork hurling in the past 10 years, his story still makes a compelling read about the trouble spots, the achievements and the triumphs of his career.
Dónal Óg’s revelations about his sexuality and descriptions of his coming out to friends, family and team-mates occupies only a few chapters in the book, but it has dominated discussion of it – rightly so, as it remakes the genre of Irish sports memoir writing.
The real significance of the book is that it is something of a Trojan Horse (an image used by Cusack himself), unsettling the accepted norms surrounding Irish male identities. His decision to come out via his sporting recollections is all the more radical and liberating because the world he depicts is an intensely male one (in the conventional sense), and thus he writes a different kind of sports memoir.
Some of our strongest perceptions around sexual identity can be traced to our public figures, so an out gay Irish sporting hero enables the most profound affirmation, particularly for Irish gay men and women who love hurling.
His book begs the question: why is he the first Irish sports star to come out? Perhaps because homophobic prejudice is closely connected with a kind of underlying misogyny, and so for a successful and self-confident athlete in a demanding sport to come out as gay complicates our idea of what it is to be a man.
Cusack says: “The gay life and the life of Cork hurlers don’t really overlap, and I could step from one world to the other with more and more ease as I got older.”
Well, thanks to Cusack’s honesty, these lives can now overlap in a much more visible way, as they have done in private up to this, and our sense of what it means to be Irish and gay or straight will be made more inclusive by the connections made within this important, brave book.
Eibhear Walshe's memoir, Cissie's Abattoir, was published by the Collins Press last month. He is a lecturer in the department of modern English at University College Cork