Claire Keegan's So Late in the Day

Intro in “The Long and Painful Death”:

“It was three o'clock in the morning when she finally crossed the bridge to Achill Island. There at last, stood the village: the fisherman's co-op, the hardware and grocery, the chapel of reddish stone, every building locked and silent under the dimly burning street lamps. On she drove along a dark strip of road where, on either side, tall rhododendron hedges had gone wild and out of bloom. Not one person did she see, not one lighted window, just sleeping, black-legged sheep and later a fox standing fearsome and still in the headlights. The way grew steep then rounded into a wide, empty road. She could feel the ocean, the bogs; immense, open space. The turn for Dugort wasn't marked – but she felt confident in turning north along the uninhabited road that took her to the Böll House.”

Chills! Keep thinking about this. Just effortless.

#clairekeegan #solateintheday #books

Finished All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt today, the second book in my Irish Writers series. The memoir weaves his history, relationships, and inspirations into a story about queerness, not quite coming into one's own but getting to place where moving forward is a possibility. The writing is slithery and detailed yet warm. He is a poet after all. I wasn't sure if I enjoyed it at first, but Hewitt has a way of writing about Big Feelings like desire, fear, love, shame, grief that left me moved. The descriptions of mental health episodes made me feel like I was in there experiencing them too, as his partner Elias, as Hewitt himself, and as myself carrying my own experiences.

Passages that resonated:

“For most of my life I had thought that all I could be sure of was the past. I think I had seen memory as a sort of route, a pathway, which stopped off at all the significant events of my life, and formed a narrative, explaining how I got to where I am, and how I got to be who I am. Like stepping stones across the river Lethe, there were some memories I held on to. Over all that river of forgetfulness – into which experiences, thoughts and words dropped every day – these memories made a crossing, some solid ground I could traverse. All those years, it was as though time were blowing through me and taking form, being winnowed into narrative.”

“When we buried him, we planted flowers on his grave, and every time I visited I saw that those flowers were my father, were made out of him. He was being born again into the earth, in a new form, and it wouldn't be long until all of his atoms were dispersed across the village, then the country, and then the world, carried off inside birds, growing into plants, and into butterflies. What was the garden, then, if not heaven, if not a place made up of everything that had been lost to us, if not an afterlife? After that, the whole world could be heaven to me. Still, it seems like the most simple, the most beautiful way I can think of looking at life. Everything, all of it, is mimicry.”

#seanhewitt #alldowndarknesswide #books