We are privileged to have three consummate writers, Phyl Herbert, Liz McManus and Mary Rose Callaghan, with us to discuss their acclaimed memoirs in conversation with a great friend of the Festival, Sinead Crowley. Not to be missed.
Phyl Herbert is an actor/director/teacher/writer who has written a memoir ‘The Price of Silence’ (published by Menma Books) about her life, which included getting pregnant by a married man, going to a Mother & Baby Home secretly and having to give up her only child for adoption, a daughter who contacted her 26 years later. Late last year she spoke to Miriam O'Callaghan on her radio programme.
Liz McManus is a former Labour Party politician who served as a Teachta Dála for the Wicklow constituency from 1992 to 2011. When Things Come to Light is a different kind of memoir because, although Liz never knew her maternal grandparents, by using old family papers she has pieced together their story. Wallace and Margaret McKay are Unitarian by birth and republican by conviction. It is the start of the twentieth century and hopes for Irish independence are growing. Wallace's job takes the young couple and their children to North East India, to the tea gardens of Assam, where, before too long, tragedy strikes. Even within the family, ruptures are caused, so deep they cannot be breached.
Mary Rose Callaghan began writing as a journalist in 1973 and was widely published before moving to the United States in 1975, where she finished her first novel, Mothers, in 1978.
While continuing to write fiction, she also worked as a contributing editor for the Journal of Irish Literature from 1975 to 1993, and was associate editor for the first two editions of the Dictionary of Irish Literature. She has taught writing at th e University of Delaware.
Eventually moving back to Ireland, Mary Rose now lives in Bray, where she teaches and writes. The Deep End is her memoir of growing up in Dublin from the mid-1940s in a once well-off family fallen on hard times and forced at times to struggle with extreme poverty.
This promises to be a hugely enjoyable event as these three very successful women take us on their fascinating and uplifting journeys through life and explain just what compelled them to publish their stories which go beyond the surface and delve into the tears and joy of human existence. Saturday, November 10, 3.00pm Abbey Arts Centre. Tickets: €10 + €1 Booking fee