Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?: A Memoir

In this rollicking debut, O’Reilly, a columnist for the London Observer, weaves a hilarious look at his Irish Catholic childhood with a touching tribute to his mother. When his “Mammy,” Sheila, died of breast cancer in 1991, O’Reilly writes, “my father drove back to Derry as the sole parent of eleven children.” At five years old, O’Reilly was a “newly minted half-orphan” struggling to hold onto memories of his mother. To keep them from fading as he grew older, he sought out stories of Sheila, wringing a “scant few negative” tales out of drunken family members as a kid, and scouring her old correspondences and visiting her birthplace in his adulthood—and renders them in deeply affectionate prose: “she was the sing-song cadence of the grace we said before meals... [and] the daffodils in the garden.” He also paints an archly loving portrait of his kindhearted single father, who steadfastly believed that one sheet of toilet paper “judiciously used, was sufficient for most movements”; and dispenses mordantly funny takes on his adolescence growing up in the waning years of the Troubles (“banal” fare compared to what his grandparents saw) with his 10 siblings—“to be one of eleven was singularly, fizzily demented. At best, you were the child of sex maniacs.” Chock-full of wit and compassion, this amusingly dispels “perception[s] of [Northern Irish people] as either humourless... or violent psychopaths.” (Feb.)