Dermot Healy: The Bend for Home

Dermot Healy believed for years that the doctor at his birth, despairing of a swift delivery, had climbed into bed beside his mother for a drunken nap. The discovery that the story was not about his own mother or birth introduced him to the illusory nature of memory. From the sleepy Westmeath village where his father was a policeman, the family moves to the market town of Cavan. Healy later takes off into the wider and wilder worlds of Dublin and London. Years after this, when he is back home caring for his ailing mother, she hands him his own diary of the year following his father's death in 1962. Here he re-discovers the bereaved fifteen-year-old he was and the beginnings of the writer he was to become. Lyrical, funny and generous, The Bend for Home is an original book about the past, the present and the workings of memory.