"From certain angles, the circumstances of my upbringing are disarmingly baroque," writes Séamas O'Reilly in the opening pages of his memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? O'Reilly's mother died (as the title suggests) when he was just shy of his sixth birthday, leaving him and his 10 siblings to be raised by a single father in the heart of the Troubles. Moreover, their property's fence line corresponded with the demarcation between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, complete with a checkpoint and prone to the "dystopian rigamarole undertaken by everyone who lived on [the border]."
It's hard to imagine a memoir about an author's dead mother could elicit actual belly laughs, but somehow, O'Reilly makes it happen. In the story that lends the memoir its title, a nearly six-year-old O'Reilly skips along and smiles up at every unlikely guest at his mother's wake to ask, charmingly, "Did ye hear Mammy died?" From this story--at once hilarious and heartbreaking--O'Reilly expands to consider his childhood from the distance of adulthood. He recalls with tenderness and care his frantic father occasionally forgetting a child (or two) at choir pickup (and who could blame him, O'Reilly seems to ask, with so many to keep track of?).
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? expertly combines heartfelt sentiment with a dry Irish wit that will leave readers questioning if the tears on their cheeks come from joy or sadness or dark humor--or all of the above. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm