Part memoir, part manifesto, Reading Rites by Evelyn Conlon is a collection of essays full of her characteristic wit and keen intelligence as she considers what has shaped her.
She describes Reading Rites as 'about reading, writing and other things that matter', and there are many. As fellow writer Sean O’Reilly has said, ‘These essays amount to an alternative history of social change in Ireland’. She charts her coming of age in the second half of 20th century Ireland, shows how travel and books can free us, and her gift to navigate changes and move on in life as her characters do, sometimes similarly and sometimes differently in her celebrated fiction.
This opening excerpt relates her early taste for worlds beyond the small road in Monaghan where she grew up, through the comings and goings of relations, and through reading about Australia, where she would later spend important years. Her escape there from life as a scholarship undergraduate student, that didn’t work for her in the alien new Belfield campus of University College Dublin. Her decision that it was time to get herself a degree, a baby and to run away again, maybe to South America. Her journey back to Ireland, crossing many countries in a yellow bus in which she and her fellow travellers, as she writes ‘had enough books to keep us going, if our eyes got tired of the road’. Starting out for the second time as a student, this time in Maynooth University when she was married and a mother. Considerations on her marriage break-up and living in Ireland as a separated woman in the 1980s. And books she would bring with her in a bag, had she to choose, including the five-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing.
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