Latest news with #RositaSweetman
Irish Times
24-05-2025
- Irish Times
Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup by Rosita Sweetman: A short, lively and fast-paced memoir
Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup Author : Rosita Sweetman ISBN-13 : 978-1739570545 Publisher : Menma Books Guideline Price : €17.50 There's a sense of doom in the vivid child-impression idyll created by Rosita Sweetman's shining prose in the first part of this short, fast-paced memoir. Sweetman loved being the middle child of nine, amid the fun, varied bustle of a large, happy and wealthy political-legal Dublin family. But a background of homes on Fitzwilliam Square and along Dublin's elite southside coast – Connemara ponies in rambling gardens, canters on the beach – wasn't enough to shield Sweetman from the pain of being female under patriarchal rule and a misogynistic culture. Born in the mid-1940s, Sweetman came of age under Catholic theocracy in a State that systematically reduced women and girls to third-class citizenship. In response, she joined other Irish feminists in the late 1960s, co-founding the short-lived but pivotal Irish Women's Liberation Movement. She used her journalistic flair to spread feminist ideas in national newspapers and shared pints and politics with figures like Nell McCafferty. Sweetman had early success with bestselling non-fiction books, On Our Knees, and On Our Backs: Sexual Attitudes in a Changing Ireland, and her feminist novel, Fathers Come First. But a damaging relationship with an older, already-married man, begun when she was just 17, devastated her literary ambitions. They married (he was British so could divorce) and were together for 20 years. She managed to escape with her two young children, a Herculean feat at a time when there was no divorce in Ireland, and women who left could be framed as 'deserters', risking home and custody, never mind court-ordered child maintenance. READ MORE Girl with a Fork captures the painful paradox of how a woman steeped in feminist politics can still get entangled in male supremacist abuse – emotional, sexual, physical, and financial. Sweetman lays it bare: the gaslighting, the erosion of confidence, the exhaustion of broke single-handed parenting, while her husband serially cheated, including with relatives, repeatedly abandoning and returning. What's redemptive about this harrowing tale is Sweetman's subtle casting back – through therapy – to trace how family trauma, especially her younger sister's childhood death, and a harsh convent education played into her entrapment. With brave honesty, Sweetman admits how, in her damaged state, she was passing on to her children the emotional abuse she'd suffered – until healing enabled her to break the chain.
Irish Independent
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
‘The objective of the book wasn't to hurt my family, it was to free myself' – Author and activist Rosita Sweetman on her candid new memoir
Rosita Sweetman talks about finding catharsis in writing a new memoir that delves into her childhood, as well as the broken marriage in which her husband had an affair with her sister, leading to Rosita's estrangement from her siblings Today at 21:30 Although much of Rosita Sweetman's explosively honest new memoir, Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup, documents the turbulent years of her marriage, the crux of the story, the two events from which it feels all subsequent events follow, come almost at the start, when she is only a child. After a small, unexpected inheritance, Sweetman and her twin sister, aged nine, are sent to boarding school. 'Mum got 300 quid in an envelope one night from Archbishop McQuaid. Because a relative of hers had left his millions to him,' she tells me almost casually.
