Kirjahaku

One day, when Mary Rose Callaghan was 13, her mother jumped into the freezing Irish Sea. Knowing that her mother was an asthmatic, the shock of seeing her dive into “the deep end” began Mary Rose’s curiosity about her mother’s life. That curiosity spawned the writing of this memoir, a coming-of-age tale focused on Mary Rose’s relationship with her mother, which endured through economic hardship, and her mother’s descent into mental illness and alcoholism. The Deep End begins by tracing her mother’s arrival in Ireland in the 1930s, training to be a nurse, and marriage to Mary Rose’s father, continues through Mary Rose’s difficult childhood and later success as a writer, and culminates with her marriage to Robert Hogan and her mother’s death.

Mary Rose Callaghan’s Awkward Women introduces readers to Sally Ann Fitzpatrick, an untidy, unruly, uncertain young woman living her life as best she can in a rapidly changing world. She strives bravely, and with delightfully self-deprecating irony, for a sense of her own identity and independence. Full of gentle sympathy and humorous understanding, these interconnected stories, set between the 1960s and the 1980s in Ireland and the United States, are thoroughly engaging and enriching.