Don't Wake Me at Doyles
A Memoir
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher 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.
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.