This Interim Time

by Oona Frawley

 

How do we live when our loved ones are dying? How do we make sense of the world in their wake? And how do we balance love in the present with memory of the past?

As she witnesses her mother's descent into dementia and a beloved friend's cruel battle with cancer, Oona Frawley reconsiders the death of her father in New York decades earlier, the loss of her parents' home in Ireland before she was born, and the births of her own children. Balancing between grief at the passing of those closest to her, and joy at the emergence of new life, Frawley has wrought a stunning meditation on memory, family and the brief windows of life we share with those we love.

Utterly humane, fearlessly honest and always, at its core, hopeful, This Interim Time is a powerful, moving work at once intensely personal and entirely universal.

217 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 15, 2025

About the author

Born in NYC to Irish-actor parents, Oona has lived in Ireland full-time since completing her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. She has held post-doctoral fellowships at Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin, and has lectured in the Department of English at Maynooth University since 2008. Oona's research interests lie in Irish Studies, particularly of the late 19th and 29th centuries, in Memory and Trauma Studies, and in ecocriticism. A Hennessy Award nominee, her first novel, Flight, was published in 2014 and was nominated for an Irish Book Award in the 'newcomer' category.Oona is currently writing a book on postcolonial ecocriticism, comparing Irish, American, Australian and New Zealand literature for attitudes towards land development, waste, and the environment.

(from https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/eng...)

Reviews

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written and organized book which unfolds gently into the exploration of what a person feels and does and how they handle the deaths of loved ones. It is a book about love, not regret, and about doing the best one can with the given situation. It is about getting on with life, even when feeling incapacitated by overwhelming emotions of sorrow and loss. But it is not a sad book. It is a testament to what those who died brought to the author's life and how she honors that legacy.

I ran across this book accidentally while browsing on the internet, and I suddenly realized that not only did I recognize the surname, but my husband and I were actually acquainted with the author's parents, a lifetime ago when we lived in Seattle. This recognition added depth to the reading, as I recalled the times we had seen them on stage and conversed with them at parties we were privileged to attend. And how delighted we were when their careers took them to the stages of New York--but how we missed the opportunities to see them again on the Seattle boards. Ms. Frawley's book brought back many good memories, and I felt honored to share in the story of her parents' lives after Seattle.