All Will Be Well
A Memoir
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From award-winning author John McGahern, a memoir of his childhood in the Irish countryside and the beginnings of his life as a writer.
McGahern describes his early years as one of seven children growing up in rural County Leitrim, a childhood was marked by his father’s violent nature and the early death of his beloved mother. Tracing the memories of home through both people and place, McGahern details family life and the beginnings of a writing career that would take him far from home, and then back again. Haunting and illuminating, All Will Be Well is an unforgettable portrait of Ireland and one of its most beloved writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Now in his early 70s, award-winning novelist McGahern grew up in rural Ireland, the oldest of seven children in a dysfunctional, devoutly religious family. He adored his schoolteacher mother, who died of breast cancer when he was nine, and he writes of her with awe and tenderness. The young McGahern set his sights on the priesthood, a dream tied up with his love of his mother: "We'll live together in an old presbytery close to the church, and when you die I'll say so many Masses for you that you'll hardly have to spend any time in purgatory." She was the opposite of his coldly calculating father, Frank, who was suspicious, secretive, miserly and fueled by a need to dominate everyone in his life. The kind of husband who prayed for his dying wife, but didn't sit by her bedside, and the kind of father who didn't attend his children's weddings, Frank was the obvious inspiration for the patriarch of McGahern's most famous work, Amongst Women. The writing is lyrically beautiful and rich in details of Ireland of the '40s and '50s. Yet the memoir is also hard to penetrate because of its digressions and the unfortunate editorial choice to run the text together without chapter breaks.
