Moments Of Glad Grace , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Alison Wearing

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

127 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Moments of Glad Grace is a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love, and the hunt for roots and belonging. The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data and documents. Being 80 and in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, Joe invites his daughter Alison to come along as his research assistant, which might have worked very well had she any interest - any at all - in genealogy. Very quickly, the father-daughter pilgrimage becomes more comical than fruitful, more of a bittersweet adventure than a studious mission. And rather than rigorous genealogy, their explorations move into the realm of family and forgiveness, the primal search for identity and belonging, and questions about responsibility to our ancestors and the extent to which we are shaped by the people who came before us. Though continually bursting with humor, Moments of Glad Grace ultimately becomes a song of appreciation for the precious and limited time we have with our parents, t

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	16 avril 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773054971
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Moments of Glad Grace
A Memoir
Alison Wearing

Contents
Praise
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Saturday
Dublin Airport
10 Bow Street
Turd Space Café
Trinity College
Sunday
10 Bow Street
Custom House Quay
Monday
National Archives of Ireland
National Library of Ireland
Tuesday
10 Bow Street
Corless’s Pub
The Registry of Deeds
The Elbowroom
Wednesday
10 Bow Street
Royal Irish Academy
National Library
The Liffey
Thursday
10 Bow Street
The Liffey
National Library
Nassau Street
Outhouse Theatre
Friday
10 Bow Street
Saturday
Seomra na Léitheoieachta
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright

Praise
Praise for Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter
“ Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter had me in tears: first of laughter, then of sadness, then of wonder at life’s strange and marvelous fragility. It is a book both beautiful and true; about the longing for family and for home. Alison Wearing is a hugely talented writer.”
— Alison Pick, author of the Man Booker Prize–nominated Far to Go
“This exquisitely written and deeply compassionate memoir tells the story of a family and a nation at a turning point in their sexual and political awakening . . . This book is for anyone who chooses to live (and love) openly and freely.”
— Kamal Al-Solaylee, author of Intolerable and Brown
“Part memoir, part history book, part diary and all parts heart. Alison Wearing weaves a tale that celebrates the complexities of who we are and the families we hold close. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is painful, tender, poignant and — most important — beautifully honest.”
— Brian Francis, author of Break in Case of Emergency and Fruit
Praise for Honeymoon in Purdah
“One of the best pieces of travel writing it has been my privilege to read in this, or any, millennium.”
— Ottawa Citizen
“As with any good travel book, Honeymoon in Purdah is not a tour of monuments, but an exploration of a nation’s psyche, in this case a proud, generous, and enduring one.”
— Globe and Mail
“Bright and searingly observant, [Wearing] paints indelible moments from her honeymoon with Iran . . . The cumulative effect is like reading Alice in Wonderland .”
— Toronto Star
“This book is why we travel and why we read travel writing: to be transported, and to return transformed.”
— Jamie Zeppa, author of Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan

Dedication
For my family, both blood & soul.

Author’s Note
It seems only fair to offer anonymity to people who find themselves as characters in books. For no matter how hard writers might try to be accurate in our portrayals, the people we paint onto the pages of memoir are only ever characters inspired by real people, renditions that almost invariably differ from how those same individuals see themselves.
To some in this book I have offered the simple mask of a pseudonym, to others a slightly more elaborate costume: a wig, a change of birthplace or spouse. Sticklers might say that such smudges to the canvas are only permissible in the galleries of fiction, but rather than hampering the truth of a portrait, I believe these brushstrokes are sometimes necessary for it to freely emerge.
The one person who cannot be disguised is my father. I was as surprised as anyone to find myself writing yet another memoir that cast him as a central figure, but he has been gracious and generous in his understanding that inspiration is a mysterious energy, writing evolves with its own inner dynamics, and, in the end, books are as much crafted by the writer as they are birthed.

Epigraph
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
— W.B. Yeats

Saturday

Dublin Airport
The customs officer has the face of a merry alcoholic who also enjoys his pie. His friendly eyes flutter when I tell him the purpose of my trip — to help my father with some gynaecological research — but he doesn’t ask any further questions. Just stamps my passport and says, Welcome to Ireland, love , which feels like a moment of sanity in an otherwise crazed world.
I have come here to help my father with some genealogical research. He’s quite serious about it and has been at it for years, but a few months ago he mentioned a desire to revisit Dublin’s libraries and archives, adding that he would prefer to do it with the help of a research assistant. Count me in! I’d said immediately, though we both know I fall asleep at the mere mention of genealogy, a word I am forever confusing with gynaecology, particularly when saying it aloud.
Still, we’re here. And a bit of boredom in the archives seems a small price to pay for the chance to spend ten days in Dublin with my dad. He’ll be eighty in a few months — he’d say he’s seventy-nine and a half — and is so fit and active I have wondered if I’ll be the one scrambling to keep up. But he also has incip ient Parkinson’s, a disease that has begun to possess and hammer him, and I jumped at a chance for time together now.
My father does not appear in the collage of tired faces watching a slow parade of suitcases file past. We weren’t sitting together on the plane, having bought our tickets separately, and I didn’t see him in any of the lines at customs. I park myself in a visible spot and pass the time by trying to conjure a border experience which includes the phrase Welcome to the United States of America, love , but no matter how many times I attempt to lift that small kite of words into being, I am unable to keep it aloft.
When most of the bags are claimed from the belt and there is still no sign of him, I notice that when a parent is about to turn eighty, a child’s reflex changes from Where the hell’s he gone? to What if something’s happened? I walk and peer and swivel and conclude that he must have headed out of the arrivals area without me. And, indeed, on the other side of the exit’s automatic doors, I spot him looking bored. The moment I wave, however, he becomes animated, fluttering a hand to his chest and panting in theatrical, exaggerated relief while running through a breathless explanation: I didn’t see you in there so I came out here but then I realized you must have been back there but then I wasn’t allowed back in so I just had to stand here wondering how long you’d stay there waiting for me! He is giggling now, shedding so many layers of relief and excitement that I pause to wonder if the airport cleaning staff ever feel they are mopping up excess emotion in addition to casual grime. Relieved, my dad goes off to find the toilets while I stand guard over the suitcases. As I watch him disappear, I decide to begin our father-daughter escapade by creating a running list of qualities I adore about him, flipping to the back of my notebook and creating the heading Things about Dad , before printing How Often He Giggles .
A few minutes later, I look up to see him scurrying back to where I am waiting with the bags — he is not a plodder, my father; he has two speeds: Resting and Scurrying — and despite the speed at which his legs are swishing and padding along the shiny airport floor, I have time to add And the Way He Scurries before flipping my notebook shut.
This is my first time in Ireland. I’ve always intended to come, but other sunnier, more exotic places always seemed to win out. Now that I’m here, though, I can’t believe how long it’s taken me to arrive. I feel giddy, springy, can’t wait to get out and explore the city, the pubs, the famously green countryside, to fill my ears with jocular idioms, to lap up everything there is to lap. Our taxi driver is kind and talkative, effervescent with stories of weather, both typical and atypical, and the type of clothing he generally wears both winter and summer. I am delighted by his accent to a clichéd degree. He offers to take us sru de parrk on our way to our destination and I am so seduced that I tell him that would be a splendid idea, having never said splendid idea in my life and sounding ridiculous as I do so. The driver exits the highway, amps up his chattiness a few more notches, and drives a long arc through an unremarkable expanse of grass and trees while cheerfully doubling his fare.
But who cares, we’re in Ireland! On our way to an Airbnb, as about 75 percent of his customers are doing these days, the driver tells us. My dad booked the place a few months ago and while I wasn’t sure about it from the photos — I’m afraid there might be a black-and-white cow skin on the living room floor — I’ve found that few of these places actually resemble their photos, so we might be pleasantly surprised.
“Oh, dat’s a luvely area,” the driver assures us with a nice round u in luvely , adding that he believes we’ll be very happy there indeed.
He winds through a series of narrow cobblestone streets into a quaint, historic neighbourhood and leaves us at the front gates of the old Jameson Distillery. Which is odd, until we learn that the polished limestone building was recently remodelled to house a whiskey museum and a cluster of condos holding the echoes of three centuries of people saying cheers .
Indeed, I believe we’ll be very happy here.

10 Bow Street
The apartment is bright and spacious with a clever triangular addition to the main room made of floor-to-ceiling windows