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Annaghkeen
This evocative journal describes a summer Deborah Love spent on Annaghkeen Island in Ireland with her husband, the writer Peter Matthiessen. A strong undercurrent of emotional unrest is beautifully and deftly treated so that what emerges is two parallel stories which intertwine but never touch: the specific one of the journey and the more abstract one of the marriage.
215 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 26, 2020
I tried to read this book when I was a sophomore in high school because I liked the idea of living in a cottage in Ireland. It was way, way, way over my head at the time and I didn't finish. Annaghkeen is the journal of Deborah Love, who, with her husband Peter Mattheissen, spent a summer in Ireland with two of their three children.
Love's reflections are wise and relevant today--surprisingly so--although I could imagine the social media sphere not bothering to actually read what she wrote in favor of judging her in advance for leaving her infant son in the States during this time. They'd probably dig up the dirt about her experimentation with drugs, marital ups and downs--the usual hypocritical tripe--which is a pity because Annaghkeen is a book you could read and reflect on again and again.
Love--
On silence:
"Tension builds from not satisfying ourselves, and we break it with babbling. What is it the organism shrieks for? We answer with words from the text. But we will never find out until we are quiet."
". . .the seat of speech [is] not the self after all, but an integrator of the self, a tool more complex than his hand."
On Privilege/Oppression
"A tour of the monastery would begin in a few minutes. Women could not go, I felt a familiar pang, a mixture of panic and sadness, at being excluded for being a woman. It must be the underlying tone of a [person of color's] life" . . . the pang [was soon] dismissed by the director of human relationships in my head. . . ."
On reflection and time and the self:
"Then restless, I got off the horse and sat on a boulder, warm from the sun, and smoked a cigarette; at twelve a pack of cigarettes was twenty friends."
". . .but exploring needs an open end to time, or the illusion of time's suspension, which we were not psychologically prepared to give until we arrived at Annaghkeen. . . ."
"Babies look wise and old people look childish. One has a chance to be both old and wise if, after becoming an adult one agrees to the original child one was. The baby must be let out, to breathe, to be 'me'. (It is unlikely before twenty, for one believes in the self in the mirror, not knowing the baby is there, and if by middle age his presence has not been acknowledged the placenta of illusion has probably dried and toughened and can no longer tear.). . .the aged one with his child unborn will demand more and more of the only thing he cares for . . .attention."
Love's reflections are wise and relevant today--surprisingly so--although I could imagine the social media sphere not bothering to actually read what she wrote in favor of judging her in advance for leaving her infant son in the States during this time. They'd probably dig up the dirt about her experimentation with drugs, marital ups and downs--the usual hypocritical tripe--which is a pity because Annaghkeen is a book you could read and reflect on again and again.
Love--
On silence:
"Tension builds from not satisfying ourselves, and we break it with babbling. What is it the organism shrieks for? We answer with words from the text. But we will never find out until we are quiet."
". . .the seat of speech [is] not the self after all, but an integrator of the self, a tool more complex than his hand."
On Privilege/Oppression
"A tour of the monastery would begin in a few minutes. Women could not go, I felt a familiar pang, a mixture of panic and sadness, at being excluded for being a woman. It must be the underlying tone of a [person of color's] life" . . . the pang [was soon] dismissed by the director of human relationships in my head. . . ."
On reflection and time and the self:
"Then restless, I got off the horse and sat on a boulder, warm from the sun, and smoked a cigarette; at twelve a pack of cigarettes was twenty friends."
". . .but exploring needs an open end to time, or the illusion of time's suspension, which we were not psychologically prepared to give until we arrived at Annaghkeen. . . ."
"Babies look wise and old people look childish. One has a chance to be both old and wise if, after becoming an adult one agrees to the original child one was. The baby must be let out, to breathe, to be 'me'. (It is unlikely before twenty, for one believes in the self in the mirror, not knowing the baby is there, and if by middle age his presence has not been acknowledged the placenta of illusion has probably dried and toughened and can no longer tear.). . .the aged one with his child unborn will demand more and more of the only thing he cares for . . .attention."
December 14, 2025
I am surprised to find this long-out-of-print book on Good Reads. It is by my mother Deborah Love. My memoir, Castles & Ruins, uses many excerpts from Annaghkeen throughout its pages. Just now I am recording my book in audio form. Thrillingly, I have come across tapes of my mother reading Annaghkeen to a friend who was blind. I remember her recording them, not long before her last trip to the hospital. I now have the digitized tapes, and am using excerpts from them in my audio edition of Castles & Ruins. The tapes are not complete, but I've been able to plug in about half of the excerpts in her voice. To have her reading her wonderful work herself, decades later, is like a sort of miracle. The rest I do myself, in as close to her mid-Atlantic/slightly southern accent as I can manage.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews