The Bend For Home: A Memoir

Mr. Healy broke open my mind with this book. I was suffering from big blocks of logic head (I would have denied that this could ever happen to me when I was a kid,) and didn't even know it until I tossed this book to the floor in frustration after the first two paragraphs; and then, picked it up again because I wasn't going to be so easily beat. Yep, that's how ridiculous my mind was at the time. The next thing that I knew, I was in a car with young Dermot and his father. I stayed for the whole journey, and refused to read the end 4 times so that I could start over, and do it again. It's really something when a writer makes you want to re-live THEIR life, or their life as they remember it, or as you remember it after four passes through it. One thing though, a small thing really...there are sectors of this life story missing so I had to fill in the blanks. THAT was great fun, so maybe it was deliberate. But and also, if you've a loved one with Alzheimer's disease, like my own wonderful grandmother; this book will make you weep with recognition. Lastly, in writing this review I find that I miss Maisie. I'll have to read it again, so that she's still around.

In this bittersweet memoir about growing up and growing old, Dermot Healy explores the quality of memory, of tales told and heard and told again, of times half-remembered. Highly stylistic prose reflects the stream of human consciousness, where sometimes a leaf floats past and we think we recognize it as a leaf that floated past a year before. Dermot Healy's "Bend for Home" is part "Portrait of the Artist" and part "Angela's Ashes," combining the ambient grey of Irish poverty with characteristic Irish humor.Healy has been criticized for betraying his mother's memory in the book's sometimes hilarious, sometimes wrenching last chapter. But it is one of the most touching accounts of a son and mother's last days together since I read Mark Spragg's "Where Rivers Change Direction." What would make his mother proud is knowing that Healy has become one of the first rank of Irish authors, and his account of her decline is a sad, beautiful piece of work.Healy should be more widely read in America, if only because his is an original voice in a new key, Irish accent or not.

Dermot Healy doesn't write like Frank McCourt or anyone else, he writes his memior like Dermot Healy. Accept that and you are off to a good start to be able to appreciate his memior.What I found refershing about his way of writing was he did it more to a way that people do tend to recall their lives. It isn't always in direct synchronization,neat,tidy,perfect. We wander,there are impressions we gather because we don't always recall exact verbatum of conversations - here is where writers must embellish a bit creatively.Try to recall your own life to date, try to think of writing it. This isn't so scattered you can't make out what he is talking about but it is written in a style where we are guided to meander with him through his memories,thoughts,impressions.I think we tend to recall our lives by a more personal set of perceptions rather than _always_ an objective,clear-cut unbiased point of view. He doesn't make excuses or seem to be trying to draw pity, he reveals himself to be ultimately human, we self-inflict our own pain most of the time, we set our selves up for a good kick in the teeth. Our lives aren't always so neat and edited.The one thing I did notice missing from his memior (which initiates at childhood,flashes into youthful adult and weaves back into adolesence and then again forward to his mother being into her 80's and I would suppose him in to his 40's)is what happened during his 30's, and later a marriage. We are only briefed that he has had a daughter to whom a woman he didn't marry - there is no story of that relationship nor of his later marriage which also he quickly mentions. It leads me to feel these were not details he felt ready to share - understandingly likely because these people are still living and out of respect for privacy of their lives - none the less it would have done no harm to bare out a little more understanding, however basic which could have been done respectfully. I noticed the same with Frank McCourt's book- Angela's Ashes - he neither went into more of his life leading up to marriage or after it. The Bend for Home is a really well written book, just know it is _not_ written in the run of the mill manner in which we are used to finding on bookshelves for sale, he writes in an unappologetic fashion which displays his unique creativity as a writer.Great job, Dermot!!!

I picked up a copy of this book while visiting Ireland last summer and was not disappointed. The writing is stunningly vivid and poetic. Best of all, Healy ensures that the reader never quite knows what is real and what isn't.