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Product Description
It is New Year's Eve in Dublin, 1959. On the rooftop of 44 Seville Place, ten-year-old Peter Sheridan clings to the steel rod of a television antenna. When his father urges him to turn the antenna toward England, the boy reaches up, and pictures from a foreign place beam into their living room. Life in the Sheridan family will never be the same again.
As the 1960s unfold, the Sheridans experience all the decade has to offer: sex, the Beatles, drugs, and The Troubles in Belfast. One of the best-known figures in Irish contemporary theater, Peter Sheridan recounts these hilarious, awkward, and heartbreaking years with exquisite timing and dramatic precision. Honest, sharp-witted, and compassionate, 44: Dublin Made Me draws us into this loving family as we explore the Dublin that shaped this young boy.
"Seldom has the blossoming of artistic passion been so effectively captured . . . it will get into your brain and your blood and stay there a long time."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Peter Sheridan writes at the crossroads where hilarity and heartbreak, tenderness and savagery meet. The people who live there are often cruel, often magnificent, and always, always human. He captures them perfectly."--Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and A Star Called Henry
"Sharp, jazzy, hilarious, and often painful . . . You'll rejoice in this wild song of a book."--Frank McCourt
44 was short-listed for The Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Nonfiction
Amazon.com Review
Theater director Peter Sheridan's bracing memoir is timelessly Irish in its lyrical, word-drunk portrait of a boisterous family touched by tragedy: his younger brother, Frankie, died, aged 10, from a brain tumor. The book is also very much a document of the 1960s. It opens on New Year's Eve as 10-year-old Peter and his Da struggle to install a roof antenna: "Half an hour into 1960 we all sat staring at the television." The television goes on to play a major role in the Sheridans' perceptions of life beyond 44 Seville Place, Dublin, particularly when the Troubles explode across the border in Northern Ireland, their mother's birthplace. Rock & roll provides the soundtrack of Peter's youth, though theater becomes the lifeblood for him and older brother Shea (better known now as film director Jim Sheridan--My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father). Ending with the decade's last New Year's Eve, as he prepares to enter Trinity College, Sheridan closes a complex but seamless circle of metaphors and themes. His father finds the part necessary to fix their ancient TV, and when the family hears Da singing "Frankie and Johnny" in the bath for the first time since their Frankie's death, they know they have survived. --Wendy Smith
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