Don't Wake Me at Doyle's: A Memoir

From Publishers Weekly
Murphy's skillful storytelling and optimistic spirit give even the grimmest moments of her difficult life story levity in this hopeful, spunky sister to Angela's Ashes. Born in 1928, "a delicate child with a peculiar shape... chronically ugly and cross as a briar," Murphy was the third of seven children in a rural family. With few work prospects in the "middle of Ireland's bog land," she moved to Dublin to become a housekeeper, and after a few years was raped by her boyfriend, got pregnant and saw no other choice but to marry him. Murphy soon learned that her husband, loving and hardworking when sober, became violent and abusive when he drank, which he did almost every night. And in what Murphy calls the Catholic tradition, his right to sex was never questioned. Over the next 10 years, Murphy gave birth to eight more children, until a prolapsed uterus forced her to have a hysterectomy. Murphy left and returned to her husband numerous times, suffered homelessness and depression, and fought to get her children a decent education. Yet she found happiness in pleasures great (interacting with her children) and small (playing bingo). She nearly died of lung cancer six years ago and refers to her struggles with the disease throughout this book. Her entire family kept diaries during her illness, and excerpts from their writings enrich this memoir with multiple viewpoints. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
What happens when a spirited young woman born into rural poverty moves to the city for work and happiness? This book could be set in any number of places, from Bangladesh to Appalachia, where eager young women are mired in rather than rising above their station. That it is set in Ireland, among the immigrant Irish of England, returning to make good, sets it apart only in its particulars. Although at the end, Murphy does more than simply survive--we leave her in genteel surroundings in England--most of the book shows her nearly going under in a world of sexism, anti-Irish racism, and class oppression. Threaded through the book is the dramatic story of Murphy's near death from cancer, and the changes that wrought in her life. Flashbacks describe the grinding poverty she endured with a large family and hard-drinking, often violent husband. What makes it all bearable is the stubborn optimism of Murphy's narrative voice and her finally prevailing over circumstance and social limitations to find and use it in this memoir. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
"Murphy's skillful storytelling and optimistic spirit give even the grimmest moments of her difficult life story levity in this hopeful, spunky sister to Angela's Ashes."- Publishers Weekly

Maura Murphy's memoir of life in Ireland and beyond resonates with the people, places, and struggles of an almost forgotten generation. Born "chronically ugly and cross as a briar" into a poor, rural homestead in 1920s Ireland, Maura faced adversity from birth. She grew up in the bogs of the Irish countryside and left school at fourteen for Dublin, working in service there until her marriage to a hardworking but hard-drinking womanizer. Poverty stricken and hoping to find a better life for her five young children, she left Ireland with her family for 1950s Birmingham, England.

But life doesn't always change when places do, and Maura's fear that she'd be "waked" at Doyles bar upon her death is funny but dead serious. Her voice is feisty and fearless, and she needed to be all those things to survive an extraordinary series of privations and abuses. And now, seventy-five and having survived her childhood, recovered from cancer, and left her marriage of fifty years, Maura has finally recorded the story of her life. Don't Wake Me at Doyles is the compelling account of a life set against by bad odds and worse luck: a memoir of survival and success in the face of the limits of class, education, nationality, religion, gender, and even health.

A fearlessly honest writer, Maura invites us into her world, through her destructive marriage, and the birth of her nine children, and towards a life-or-death choice that would change her forever. Told with biting wit, Don't Wake Me at Doyles is a personal story of one woman's endurance, and the remarkable memoir of an ordinary woman's extraordinary life.



About the Author
Maura Murphy was born in Clongmore, Country Offaly, in 1928. She left Ballybryan National School when she was fourteen with "no qualifications and even fewer prospects." She worked as a domestic servant in various houses in Dublin until she met and married John Murphy, a soldier stationed at Portobello Barracks. The couple moved to Birmingham, England, in 1959 where they reared nine children. They have eleven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Maura now lives in Birmingham, England, in the West Midlands.



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Lovely memoir of a roving life, full of dread and great affection. Murphy ("a cross little weasel") was born into privation and poverty that are still with her after 75 years. Yet the memories held in these pages resound not with bitterness, but with spunk and wonder. Her story starts innocently enough, in Ireland after WWI, with tales of gypsies and card-playing, singing and superstitions, rituals and herbal cures, carbolic soap and childhood mortality, and concocting sins for confession. The author creates for readers a deeply atmospheric world, hard but vital. There came a time when her mouth was one too many to feed, and she had to make her own way in the world. She met a man at a dance (a venue for socializing that gives the period a very specific gravity), got pregnant, got married. And she stayed in that marriage, to a man who would cheat on and beat her: maybe because she was Catholic, maybe so that her nine children would have a semblance of family, maybe because she just thought it was the right thing to do. Security would not be the couple's fortune. Seeking domestic employment, they were footloose; twice the children had to be sent into foster care when their mother was sick and their father too feckless to care. They endured evictions and bailiffs smashing the furniture, episodes of English bigotry toward the Irish, many nights when they were lucky to have scallions, bread, and margarine for dinner. Their children had to grow up fast, learning to dodge the stinging familial bullets amidst the throat-tightening displays of love and protectiveness. Threaded throughout the narrative, gnawing like a rat, is the lung cancer whose discovery, in 1999, led the author to leave herhusband and their by-then 50-year marriage. When it's "time to shove off," as she says, you'll want to be there to lend Murphy a hand onto any coach of exit she chooses. Agent: Mary Pachnos/Gillon Aitken Associates


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