44 Dublin Made Me
- Book Review,
by Peter Sheridan
Amazon.com
Theater director Peter Sheridan's bracing memoir is timelessly Irish in its lyrical, word-drunk portrait of a boisterous family touched by tragedy: his younger brother, Frankie, died, aged 10, from a brain tumor. The book is also very much a document of the 1960s. It opens on New Year's Eve as 10-year-old Peter and his Da struggle to install a roof antenna: "Half an hour into 1960 we all sat staring at the television." The television goes on to play a major role in the Sheridans' perceptions of life beyond 44 Seville Place, Dublin, particularly when the Troubles explode across the border in Northern Ireland, their mother's birthplace. Rock & roll provides the soundtrack of Peter's youth, though theater becomes the lifeblood for him and older brother Shea (better known now as film director Jim Sheridan--My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father). Ending with the decade's last New Year's Eve, as he prepares to enter Trinity College, Sheridan closes a complex but seamless circle of metaphors and themes. His father finds the part necessary to fix their ancient TV, and when the family hears Da singing "Frankie and Johnny" in the bath for the first time since their Frankie's death, they know they have survived. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Sheridan's crackling prose and details about Dublin life recall the fiction of Roddy Doyle, but this real-life story paints a brighter picture of the Irish family than does Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. With belly-laughs, sighs and tears, Sheridan recalls life at his home at 44 Seville Place during the 1960s, when he came of age, the Beatles made Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Americans walked on the moon. Looming large in the narrative is his ebullient father, whom we first see using cut-up pages of the Dublin phone book for toilet paper. "Da"'s comic mishaps include food poisoning from repairing his own false teeth, and blue and purple hair from an amateur dye job. Sheridan also pokes fun at himself, milking the classic autobiographical themes of ineptitude in sports and love. Fear of a sadistic teacher, the trauma of sexual predation and death in the family provide the darker memories of growing up. Sheridan, a prominent figure in contemporary Irish theater, was the first student from his local school in 25 years to go to university. With his brother, film director Jim Sheridan, he well represents the current cultural explosion in Ireland, and communicates the experiences and values that fuel today's rich artistic scene. Readers of this friendly, direct book will easily be able to picture the author telling his tales in a cozy Dublin pub. Penguin audio; author tour. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Forty-four is the number of the house on Seville Place in Dublin where Sheridan, one of the most renowned figures in contemporary Irish theater, grew up in a family of seven plus four lodgers who were taken in to supplement his father's railroad and gambling incomes. His colorful, funny, and moving autobiography begins in 1960 when he was ten and lived in the small world of home, school, the sweet shop, and the train station. Young Peter commiserates with his friend Andy about their lives and pines for Andy's sister as they become old enough to explore their Dublin. These pages evoke the atmosphere of the city and are a beautiful tribute to it. Sheridan captures the tumultuous 1960sAfrom Elvis to the Beatles, television, movies, sexuality, and loss, as well as the Troubles in BelfastAwith witty and poignant dialog at 44 Seville Place. This marvelous autobiography is recommended for both public and academic libraries. Young adult readers may also enjoy its coming-of-age story.ALisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll., VA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Tobin Harshaw
...although these sketches never deliver the emotional climax they strive for, its' still a good deal of fun never quite getting there.
From Booklist
'Tis the season of the brother. First we had Malachy McCourt, sib of Frank (Angela's Ashes) McCourt, with his own memoir of growing up in the same family. Now comes filmmaker Jim Sheridan's brother's novelistic account of growing up, if not In the Name of the Father of Jim's movie, under the influence of the same dad. That man was a wild but charming gambler and a monumental drinker. Sheridan uses a tough, gritty style to capture the tough grittiness of his Dublin neighborhood--no idyllic green fields to come home through there, only back alleys and crowded boardinghouses and dingy bars. This is a believable, compelling portrait of urban Irish life at midcentury, but as a psychological portrait, it leaves something out, for however did this tender child grow sufficiently strong to found and direct the famous Project Arts Company and become a director at the Abbey Theater? The subtext of survival is embedded almost too deeply to be visible. With an author tour and national publicity planned, expect demand even past St. Patrick's Day. Patricia Monaghan
From Kirkus Reviews
A funny, tender, and vividly rendered memoir of the author's boyhood in 1960s Dublin. Irish theater director Sheridan spent his youth in a house teeming with siblings and miscellaneous lodgers. Like Angela's Ashes, this is a memoir about a family's muddling through, of a boy's learning to laugh in order to keep from crying. Though less squalid than McCourt's Limerick, Sheridan's Dublin is a quirky, colorful place. His dad is a hilariously indefatigable Mr. Fix-it, vanquished repeatedly by a malfunctioning TV set and a diabolically possessed washing machine. Never have the frustrations of home repair been so delightfully chronicled. Here's Sheridan on the family's maniacal washing machine: ``Every time [ma] turned it on, it leaked. When one source was plugged, it found somewhere else to leak from. . .We were living permanently in Wellington boots. If things continued, a raft was next.'' As in most Irish memoirs about childhood, Sheridan's school is a repressive prison run by bullying, sometimes pedophile priests. Sheridan and his friend Andy form a bad garage band, listen to Beatles records, and smoke pot. Andy's older sister becomes the object of Sheridans painful first love, the target of his hopelessly ineffective romantic advances. Sheridan sneaks into a Swedish movie about birth and the female anatomy. Mouth agape, he emerges from the theater a wiser man: ``Now life was awash with new concepts . . . with uterus, cervix, and placenta, words that sounded like planets from the outer reaches of the solar system.'' Tragedy arrives when the author's younger brother dies after brain surgery. Looking at his devastated parents, Sheridan has an epiphany: ``Maybe that's all there wasprocreation and death. You live on in your children, but you die.'' At 17, Sheridan finds the love of his life: the theater. Acting becomes his way of understanding himself and the world around him. A thoroughly enjoyable, comic journey back in time; Sheridan has brilliantly re-created his delightful, poignant boyhood. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Reviews, 4/1/99
A funny, tender, and vividly rendered memoir of the author's boyhood in 1960's Dublin. Like "Angela's Ashes", this is a memoir about a family's muddling through, of a boy's learning to laugh in order to keep from crying. A thoroughly enjoyable, comic journey back in time; Sheridan has brilliantly re-created his delightful, poignant boyhood.
Book Description
It is New Year's Eve in Dublin, 1959. On the rooftop of 44 Seville Place, ten-year-old Peter Sheridan clings to the steel rod of a television antenna. When his father urges him to turn the antenna toward England, the boy reaches up, and pictures from a foreign place beam into their living room. Life in the Sheridan family will never be the same again.
As the 1960s unfold, the Sheridans experience all the decade has to offer: sex, the Beatles, drugs, and The Troubles in Belfast. One of the best-known figures in Irish contemporary theater, Peter Sheridan recounts these hilarious, awkward, and heartbreaking years with exquisite timing and dramatic precision. Honest, sharp-witted, and compassionate, 44: Dublin Made Me draws us into this loving family as we explore the Dublin that shaped this young boy.
"Seldom has the blossoming of artistic passion been so effectively captured . . . it will get into your brain and your blood and stay there a long time."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Peter Sheridan writes at the crossroads where hilarity and heartbreak, tenderness and savagery meet. The people who live there are often cruel, often magnificent, and always, always human. He captures them perfectly."--Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and A Star Called Henry
"Sharp, jazzy, hilarious, and often painful . . . You'll rejoice in this wild song of a book."--Frank McCourt
44 was short-listed for The Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Nonfiction
About the Author
Peter Sheridan is the cofounder (with his brother, Jim Sheridan) of the Project Theatre Company in Ireland. He has worked for many years as a director at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In the U.S. he has directed at the Irish Arts Center and the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, the Los Angeles Theater Center, and the Live Oak Theater in Austin.
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