2 days ago
This Interim Time by Oona Frawley: Moving essays by the daughter of Irish actors in New York
This Interim Time
Author
:
Oona Frawley
ISBN-13
:
978-1843519225
Publisher
:
Lilliput
Guideline Price
:
€16.95
'I did not understand that the approaching loss would affect me, or how; I did not know that as the years passed I would begin to see him from different perspectives and rue that he did not live long enough to know that.'
Academic and novelist Oona Frawley's
collection
of essays deal with grief and memory and how our perspectives on both shift as we gain both age and experience. Rooted in the writer's own experience as a daughter of an
Irish
immigrant actor couple in
New York
, these essays offer the intriguing viewpoint of a person neither truly here nor there. The sense of otherness makes the writer's work of piecing together information about her parents' lives all the more gripping.
Those with an interest in Ireland's rich
theatre
history will relish the details of her parents' lives as actors in New York. In spite of her father's alcoholism, and the resulting difficulties in their family life, there is an air of glamour here.
If anything, I would have relished a little more detail about certain aspects of the story – we discover the writer's father's shame over the loss of a job at an insurance company, but not how he and the writer's mother made the transition to becoming actors in New York. But perhaps this would have skewed the focus of these essays, which map the loss of the writer's father to cancer, then her mother to dementia, then finally the untimely loss of a close friend.
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Though the book deals with the anger and frustration of grief, there are moments of aching tenderness, such as when the defeated writer cries at her mother's bedside in her final days: 'One day I broke off, put my head down on the edge of her bed and sobbed, unable to speak. After a few moments her hand fumbled awkwardly near my hair, trying to console me.'
[
My father's friend who knew nothing about his alcoholism surprised us at his funeral
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The fragmentary style of the essays lends depth and vividness to the memories unearthed and juxtaposed. This is an absorbing and moving read for those who have enjoyed essay collections such as Katie Roiphe's The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End.
