44: Dublin Made Me - Softcover

Sheridan, Peter

3.75

455 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140286411 ISBN 13: 9780140286410

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2000

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A stirring, funny memoir of life in Dublin recalls the arrival of British television in one family's home--an event that brings sex, drugs, and the Beatles into an otherwise peaceful Catholic home. Reprint.

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Review:

Theater director Peter Sheridan's bracing memoir is timelessly Irish in its lyrical, word-drunk portrait of a boisterous family touched by tragedy: his younger brother, Frankie, died, aged 10, from a brain tumor. The book is also very much a document of the 1960s. It opens on New Year's Eve as 10-year-old Peter and his Da struggle to install a roof antenna: "Half an hour into 1960 we all sat staring at the television." The television goes on to play a major role in the Sheridans' perceptions of life beyond 44 Seville Place, Dublin, particularly when the Troubles explode across the border in Northern Ireland, their mother's birthplace. Rock & roll provides the soundtrack of Peter's youth, though theater becomes the lifeblood for him and older brother Shea (better known now as film director Jim Sheridan--My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father). Ending with the decade's last New Year's Eve, as he prepares to enter Trinity College, Sheridan closes a complex but seamless circle of metaphors and themes. His father finds the part necessary to fix their ancient TV, and when the family hears Da singing "Frankie and Johnny" in the bath for the first time since their Frankie's death, they know they have survived. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Peter Sheridan is the cofounder (with his brother, Jim Sheridan) of the Project Theatre Company in Ireland. He has worked for many years as a director at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In the U.S. he has directed at the Irish Arts Center and the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, the Los Angeles Theater Center, and the Live Oak Theater in Austin.

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