The Bend For Home: A Memoir - Hardcover

Healy, Dermot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151003041 ISBN 13: 9780151003044

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998

Synopsis

A family memoir from the award-winning Irish writer, culled from his own boyhood diary, contains recollections of Healy's father, a kind policeman in failing health, his mother's oft-told stories, and his dreamy and cynical Aunt Masie. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Dermot Healy is a poet, a playwright, and a novelist. His short-story collection Banished Misfortune won two Hennessy Awards and the Tom Gallon Award. His novels include Fighting with Shadows and A Goat's Song. He is a member of Asodana, the academy of distinguished Irish writers. He lives in Sligo, Ireland. 

Reviews

Novelist and poet Healy has produced not a memoir, as claimed, but an episodic novel in the form of a memoir. Writers, he contends, "not only make up things, but get things wrong as well. Language, to be memorable, dispenses with accuracy." That explains Healy's strategy, which includes confessions later dismissed as inventions. Still, improvements on his memories of life in Irish villages in the 1950s and 1960s do make for a sprightlier book. "It annoys me to remember those days," he writes, while relentlessly remembering them in his fashion. Healy's lengthy dialogues are clearly novelistic, and his accounts, sometimes explicit, of randy teenagers, lascivious priests and ill and dying elderly villagers, although cliches of Irish autobiography, are given freshness here. The slender narrative thread is the slow disintegration of Healy's father, a policeman retired for failing health. A long epilogue evokes the equally miserable death of the author's mother when Healy is already acquiring a reputation as a writer. The usual suspects are rounded up?poverty, hypocrisy, loneliness, failure, nostalgia, laughter, dreams, drink, death. As Healy owns up, "Those who had been there told all that happened to those who had not. And we exaggerated all we'd seen. As I am doing here, and not for the first time." (Mar.) FYI: Healy's novel A Goat's Song will be published simultaneously in paperback by Harvest.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Eschewing straightforward chronicle, Irish poet and novelist Healy (A Goat's Song, 1995), born in 1947, re-creates his upbringing through a series of impressionistic word-pictures and characterizationsmost poignantly of his father, a policeman who retired early due to ill health. Writes Healy, taking his bearings here, ``What happened is a wonder, though memory is always incomplete, like a map with places missing.'' The young boy felt trapped with his family's move from the small village of Finea to the town of Cavan, where they lived above the busy bakery-tearoom operated by his aunt Maisie and his mother, Winnie. He and his father were both sleepwalkers, seeking escape in night dreams (``most nights we set off for Finea''). Healy gives little description of how he grew to be a man in London, though he does allow a self-deprecating glimpse ahead to the writer who returns home to find himself fabricating, to the editor of the local paper, a literary success he's not yet achieved. Thematically and stylistically, Healy's talents are ever on display here; the occasional sustained heroic catalogue of Cavan, for examplethe author piling clause upon vivid clause, like so many layers of frostingproviding technical tours-de-force; though his later experience at Saint Patrick's Secondary College, rendered primarily through re-created diary entries, is far less memorable. In closing as he flash-forwards to the 1990s and his return to Cavan to care for his aged mother, infirm and losing her faculties, Healy evokes the surprising bawdiness of the old woman's humor and ruminates on an imaginary place, Hy Brazil, like another Atlantis rising out of the sea, out beyond where the author lives, in North Sligo. The island, he concludes, is, like life, ``peopled with uncertainties.'' With his descriptive talent and his knack for making comedy out of tragedy, Healy has written a beautiful, imaginative, full- blooded memoir. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"Family stories were told so often that I always thought I was there," writes Healy on the first page of this bittersweet garland of memories. The sections, united only by the author's voice and the looming presence of his father, mother, and aunt, differ greatly. Books 1 and 2, about his childhood and the move from the tiny Irish village of Finea to the larger town of Cravan, where his mother and aunt run a bakery, are effortlessly seductive, full of sweet words and rich language ("A noun was like a bowl of cream"). Book 3 braids together his adolescence and the death of his father; book 4, in diary form, is an extended riff on the young Irish male in heat, an endless and exhausting account of chasing after girls, dated carefully by the feasts of the saints. The last book chronicles his mother's dying, and how, inextricably and inevitably, her stories have become his. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

A charming memoir from Irish poet and fiction writer Healy.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151003041
• ISBN 13: 9780151003044
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 305