I wanted to learn things as quickly as it took a spirited montage to finish: was this so much to ask? A childhood spent watching films in which scrappy gangs of misfits manufacture outwardly ramshackle but entirely viable mansions in trees had led me and my siblings to believe we'd just kind of get the hang of building a treehouse as we went.
I loved this memoir - genuinely heartwarming, brutally sad in moments and gorgeously told throughout.
“Joe O'Reilly is a wonderful man, and a doting father, but he will often side with mechanical objects over his children. If it comes down to a dispute between one of us and a six-foot metal door panel clunking to the ground in a shower of sparks, he'll take the door's word for it every time.â€
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pickWonderful memoir! So funny and charming.
O‘Reilly‘s mother died when he was only five. He grew up in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles as one of eleven siblings. Winner of 2021‘s An Post Irish Book Award for biography.
“My parents were formidably—perhaps recklessly—Catholic, but even among the ranks of the devout, families with five kids were seldom seen. Seven would have been considered crisply eccentric, and nine plainly mad. To be one of eleven was singularly, fizzily demented.â€
Pic of author with his 10(!) siblings.
“One thing they don‘t tell you about mammies is that when they die you get new trousers.â€
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Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?: A Memoir | 
