That same brogue is instantly recognizable in her memoir “Grand.” In just under 300 pages, it trips through a life lived at once too close to, and never far away enough from, her mother, who haunted the pubs of Cork City; who transformed, werewolf-like, at the first sip of Carling; and who fought tooth and nail to get her daughter into a “stuck-up school” with “an outlandish green uniform.” (Disclosure: McCarthy and I both worked at Radio New Zealand in 2015 and 2016, though on different teams.)
“Grand” hooked me like a fish. It is a tale of recovery and growth; deep, deep love; and almost insurmountable pain. In places, it is almost too raw to read — and the author’s note at the end left me ruminating on the nature of memory and memoir for months down the track. Not for nothing has it been picked up internationally by Penguin Sandycove, whose representative called it “brave and astonishing,” and which intends to publish it globally in July.
For fans of true-to-life tragedy, try …
“Bodies of Light,” by Jennifer Down
When does a spell of “bad luck” cease to be believable? To what extent can we trust the account of someone we know to be highly traumatized? And how much tragedy can one person endure?
In “Bodies of Light,” Down, the children of social workers, recounts the life of Maggie, a woman repeatedly pushed to the margins, who grows up in care and finds herself springing from one precarious situation to the next. Told in a distinctive, unflinching voice, it is a hard read in places, with a strong sense of verisimilitude. (If you enjoyed “Educated,” by Tara Westover, you might like this.)
For Down, she said, writing the novel was “an exercise in balance: I didn’t want to translate the grimness as ‘trauma porn’, nor did I want to sanitize it. And most of all, I didn’t want to slide into voyeurism.”
