All of Us There

by Polly Devlin, Emma Donoghue (Introduction)

Polly Devlin grew up in County Tyrone, on the shores of Lough Neagh, in the fifties -- but it might as well have been another time and place altogether. In this memoir she describes in witty, spontaneous and idiosyncratic prose her life as one of seven siblings in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland.

Genres: Ireland, Memoir

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 23, 1983

Reviews

[Rj · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to ration this one out slowly because the writing is so exquisite, reading too much in a row was like having too much pudding at once. More than that, I wanted to linger. The prose is beautiful, poetic, gorgeously crafted. As a hobby writer myself, it was quite humbling - fancy having a capacity to produce such marvellous words!

Having spent memorable parts of my childhood in Northern Ireland in the decade following the one in which this is set, I would say I think she puts across the rural Irish character perfectly - and this book would serve as great text book in illustration for that purpose alone.

Devlin, you are a genius and I am thrilled to bits to have just discovered you and look forward to reading more from you.

[Darla Ebert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a peculiar read for me mainly because of the philosophical aspect which is ok, except it was not what I was looking for when I began the book. The author has a circular style. Literally. "Circles" figure into the writing often and in surprising, but confusing, ways. There were analogies and metaphors which came into play in such a way as to further perplex me. The initial bare-bones crux of the book is a good one, it is about an Irish family of seven in the 1950's. I was hoping for a story about their lives and their impressions but I walked away feeling short-circuited, short sheeted, needing MORE.

[Michellemcnicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being Irish, i wanted to like this book, but when I read it I wanted to kill the person who recommended it for our book club. It's a good while since I read it, but that memory is strong! Feel a bit bad only giving it 3 stars.

[Nicodemus Boffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memories of a Northern Irish Girlhood

A crisp, finely written memoir. Memories are wrought in a taut, yet languid language. Within a structure that is lightly framed episodically, the memoir moves, thematically, in and out of time: pulling the reader quickly along an unpaved road to the Ardboe Celtic cross, Devlin colors her story with brief, sentence long vignettes of the old folk that littered and lived along the road; holding the reader in a seat next to the N.I. Prime Minister, Devlin touches on the flawed anger of being a minority Catholic in an island land that is overwhelmingly "Roman;" marveling the reader with her own wonder at books that come from afar to the author's cloistered country, Devlin suggests of a despair of a community that is self-devouringly inward-looking. Devlin's writing is less confessional than it is conspiratorial- she shares her past not for sympathy or expiation but for the reader's communion: sharing the small "c" Catholicism of her early life in small corner of Ireland. Read this as a companion piece to the first book of Mary McCarthy's three volume autobiography, "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.' Highly recommended.