"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]." (Worse even than the backdrop of the constant bombings of the Troubles, though, was the "nerve-obliterating period between 1999 and 2001, when no less than six of [the O'Reilly] daughters were simultaneously teenagers."
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 a 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?). On a family vacation in a caravan large enough to seat the whole family, the door fell clean off its hinges somewhere in France. He also remembers an unlikely and enormous collection of home-recorded VHS tapes cataloged in the family's garage.
While these recollections are threaded through by "everyone else's grief, cross-bred and multiplied by the twelve of us trying to make sense of it, whether together or apart," what ultimately emerges in O'Reilly's recollections is never macabre. Instead, it is a tribute to the parents who raised him--his mother, by the legacy she left behind, and his father, in his sometimes strange and yet seemingly deliberate ways of caring for each of his children through their grief. 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
Shelf Talker: This unexpectedly laugh-out-loud funny memoir tells of the author's dead mother, his 10 siblings and the single father who raised them, against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.