Seamas O'ReillyRecensioni

Recommended by Ben

A tragicomic memoir of growing up in Northern Ireland toward the end of the Troubles, as one of eleven children raised by their father after the death of their mother from cancer.

Quotes

It's an odd thing to realise how much of your homeland you've internalised, the unspoken assumptions, latent behaviours and rigid rhythms of thought that were baked into your breast before you were conscious it was happening. (120)

Maybe the archive was my dad's way of making sense out of chaos, to create a system, however arbitrary, that could approximate all the ordered specificity our world must have lacked at that time...
And I think our love of archiving is the biggest thing [I have in common with my father], a bulwark against the terror of losing. Everything in its one right, good and true place, safe from harm. (192)

I was so young when Mammy died that I sometimes felt as though I didn't know her well enough to grieve the same way my older siblings did, and that it was somehow false for me to claim the same pain as them. I think I've struggled with the shame of this my entire life. I did not experience the same grief as other members of my family, or friends who've been similarly bereaved, because it happened before I was able to understand it. (223)

Seamas O’Reilly’s mother died of cancer when he was just five years old, leaving her husband and ten other children (Seamas is the ninth). In his memoir, Seamas describes his childhood in Derry as part of an unusually large family with a devoted father who managed to keep everything together despite the tragic circumstances. There is a lot of humor in this book, like the story of a family holiday to Spain traveling in their family bus, towing a caravan. But this book is more than just light, humorous prose and anecdotes about being part of a large family. It is a memorial to a mother he never really knew, and a tribute to Seamas’ father, who made sure the children’s needs were met and, more importantly, that they knew they were loved.

So funny, albeit sad, and different enough from my own life that I was completely enveloped in the world of the O'Reillys and their families and neighbors. The author has an excellent writing style.

Seamas O'Reilly is the 9th of 11 children, and his mother died when he was five. These two facts may have defined his childhood, but only give you the bare facts of this hilarious and poignant memoir.

Told in anecdotes of growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland just after the Troubles, the memoir feels like a friend coming up to you and sharing some personal stories. Despite the title, Seamas' father features quite prominently, raising his children successfully after the death of their mother. There are moments of sadness and reflection, but the entire book is shot through with humor, whether it be a riff on how terrible fruit cakes are, or a child being a child at a funeral (I remember one of my own cousins doing something that had us giggling in the church pews). If you are inclined to read audiobooks, I highly recommend this one read by the author. He has an even, straightforward way of telling it that makes the emotional all the more poignant, and I appreciated hearing his accent and pronunciation of his siblings' names.

Hysterically funny and poignant. Proof of the expression: the English invented the language but the Irish showed us how to use it.

Simple sweet family storytelling. Truly funny though it is about growing up one of 11 Catholic children in Northern Ireland whose mother dies of cancer quite young. Luckily they have a wonderful father and are smart and healthy and funny. A 3.5 because it managed to be heartwarming without being nauseating. This is a very hard thing to do.½

I've read a number of good books lately, and this is another five star one. Mr. O'Reilly was five years old when his mother died, leaving him, his bereft father and his ten siblings to navigate school and life in Northern Ireland. The title may suggest just how funny this memoir about a death in a large family is, which is very funny, but it obscures the author's sharp observations about grief and the long road to recognizing the trauma his mother's early death caused to all who survived it.

A humorous look back over a childhood filled with love and loss. It's a gentle and moving read and the humour is abundant. There are so many one-liners laced with dark humour that people from the north are so good at. It brought back many of my own memories from my childhood and teenage years.
Everything about the time period is familiar to me as it's our collective recent history and yet in such a short space of time it has become a bygone era. Remembering the way it was back then just highlights how far Derry has moved on from the Troubles.
I listened to the audio version of this book and for the first time, I didn't need to speed up the narration on my app. I liked that the author spoke at a normal speed and in a familiar accent. It felt like he was there next to us in the pub regaling a story and having the craic. Listeners from outside Ireland or who are unfamiliar with the accent may need to tune themselves into it at a slower speed. Listening to a sample would be a good idea
I found the story very moving but not in a sad way although there are obviously sad memories touched upon. The love the author has for his father shines through and I thought it was really lovely that his father could listen to his son reading the memoir and hear him put into words what we often struggle to say out loud to those we love.
A brilliantly told memoir emotional and funny.
I voluntarily reviewed this title.

Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up because my sides still ache

The Publisher Says: A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven siblings raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles.

After the untimely death of his mother, five-year old Seamas and his ten (TEN!) siblings were left to the care of their loving but understandably beleaguered father. In this thoroughly delightful memoir, we follow Seamas and the rest of his rowdy clan as they learn to cook, clean, do the laundry, and struggle (often hilariously) to keep the household running smoothly and turn into adults in the absence of the woman who had held them together.

Along the way, we see Seamas through various adventures: There's the time the family's windows were blown out by an IRA bomb; the time a priest blessed their thirteen-seater caravan before they took off for a holiday on which they narrowly escaped death; the time Seamas worked as a guide in a leprechaun museum during the recession; and of course, the time he inadvertently found himself on ketamine while serving drinks to the President of Ireland.

Through it all, the lovable, ginger-haired Seamas regales us with his combination of wit, absurdity, and tenderness, creating a charming and unforgettable portrait of an oddly gigantic family's search for some semblance of normalcy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Thankfully, he laughs heartily throughout, and his main objections are less of taste or decency and more points of fact he felt I needed hearing. Besides telling me, several more times, to slow down, most of his input cleaves close to the pedantic. Such is the case with my description of the priest who came to bless our 26-foot-long caravan before the 3,200 mile round trip we took to Spain, the year after my mother died. I describe the oddness of the scene, the priest swinging incense around our giant caravan, in full vestments, conducting himself with the stately grace of an altogether more solemn occasion. “He wasn’t in full vestments” Daddy interjects, a hint of mocking laughter in his voice. “He was wearing a sotan” he says, with an incredulity that suggests I’d committed a faux pas equivalent to forgetting my own name.

The fact that I’d misidentified this sotan—an only marginally less formal, long cassock type affair—is sufficient for my father to consider me very badly caught out. He denies outright that he ever killed a mouse with a tiny plastic bottle of holy water in the shape of the virgin Mary, and seems particularly aggrieved that I keep saying he knows every priest in Ireland. This he decries as emblematic of my addiction to overstatement—“Séamas, there should be a disclaimer on every page”—before suggesting a figure like 70-80% would be more realistic.

That's from the LitHub piece about Author Séamas reading parts of his memoir to his blinded-by-diabetes Daddy. Because, in the end, you're not going to thank me for ruining the fun of this read by quoting some parts I highlighted to you. I think you're best going into this read, and I really, really hope you *will* go into this read, without too much explicit information.

You already know the bones, the author's one of eleven children...I need a lie-down every time I think about that...raised by a man alone. Modern sensibilities have it that men can't raise children, and that there's such a thing as overpopulation, and dear goddesses below us why the hell didn't she just kick him out of bed?! But to the devil with all that, dive into the absolutely astonishing O'Reilly family's beautifully bizarre world as remembered by the ninth of the eleven souls born to two people whose love was, I am shocked to say, well attested by all and sundry. Especially their children.

The author being gainfully employed, and even a success at his career, and none of his siblings having gone to prison, well I'd say they did very well, those delightfully out-of-step parents. I'd also say, given Séamas's astonishing capacity for reading, that the whole ecosystem of family was a healthy, if really weird, one. Who else had a Daddy whose response to an IRA bombing that shattered some of their remote house's windows was to be, in a word, unconcerned? Larger implications, political ideas, the safety of his family, all came down to "if I panic and go to pieces there is no hope of ever making all of them feel safe again." And he chose their sense of serenity, of faith that the world would be right, over his probable fears and sleeplessness...but he held no brief with hate, or with unkindness of any sort.

What stands out for me, reading this memoir of a man so much younger than myself and from such a widely divergent background, is how included I felt as I read the anecdotes. I was a guest being given the lay of the land. I was the stranger who, accidentally wandering into the ambit of the family, was welcomed with the greatest possible camaraderie and bonhomie. My drink glass was never empty and the snacks were endless, so my new friends were set to make me one of the neighbors and friends whose bemused orbits are noted and needed without breaking the harmony within.

I am so happy I read this memoir of a five-year-old "half-orphan" and his trip through this one wild and precious life (bless you, Mary Oliver, for that perfect locution) among a family he clearly loves and likes. If I were just slightly more evil, I'd be so jealous of him I'd spoiler all his jokes and tread on his every punchline. But I know when I've been offered a beautiful gift. This is one.

So, Joe O'Reilly...I know you're not going to read my words about your lad Séamas...but you should know that your work, the hard slogging work of being alive when your mate is dead...is the reason we all have a very fine gift in your son. In his gifts, so many that owe their existence and their potency to you.

A glass of cheer to you, sir.

I felt really guilty. I was laughing out loud. Reading a book about the death of a mother and the funeral and how a family of eleven children and a dad coped with life. This stuff should not be FUNNY! But, Seamas O’Reilly’s memoir had me in stitches.

I am not Irish, or Catholic, or from a large family. It doesn’t matter. O’Reilly draws his community and family and their experiences so vividly, I felt like I was. Yes, he pokes at human foibles but the love for his family and community shines through. It’s a gloriously uplifting book.

O’Reilly offers memorable characters through story and quotable descriptions. “I was Seamas of the Dead Mam,” he writes about how he was treated on Mother’s Day after the death of his mother. The family dog Nollaig “was less than a beloved pet than an uncaring brute who tumbled through our lives like a demented fat boy in an American campus comedy.” He writes about the priest’s blessing of the family caravan and the family tour of Europe.

Just thinking about this memoir makes me smile.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Séamas O’Reilly is probably best known for the now infamous Twitter thread in which he confessed to having once served drinks to President Mary McAleese while high on ketamine. In Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? he also casts a wry eye over his own past, but here he delves much further back: to O’Reilly's childhood as one of 11 children in Derry in the '90s, raised by their slightly eccentric and highly Catholic father after their mother's untimely death from cancer.

O'Reilly writes with a poignancy that's leavened by a characteristically dry Northern Irish humour, and he has a particular skill with conjuring up a whole person in just a handful of words (one grandmother is described as the "sort of person who'd keep her arms folded on a trampoline"). There are some really wonderful moments throughout, although perhaps the overall structure could be a little tighter.

A delightful tale, but a challenging listening. The author is the narrator. He has a lovely accent, he's a fabulous storyteller, and a wonderful sense of the language, but he has a machine gun delivery. I was glad to be able to slow it down a bit to be able to catch it all. Not a book to listen to while driving. It requires too much concentration. It is very much worth it. Lots of laugh out loud moments. A book with real heart!

I received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher via NetGalley.

I have been reading and enjoying Seamas O'Reilly's Guardian (or maybe Observer) column over the last few years, and this is very much in the same vein. Although the underlying and very moving theme is that of a child's bereavement, this is also very funny throughout. It is also a love letter to his amazing father.

The audiobook is read by the author and I might give a lower rating if I were rating just that (rather than the book itself). I found it hard to hear what he was saying at times - not so much his accent as the speed of his delivery.