A Nursing Life

by Aubrey Malone

Spanning no less than five generations, this is the story of a Midleton-born nurse who rises to the top of her profession in the 1960s before marriage to a carpet salesman in Clery's sees her having to leave her job and become a fulltime mother. Tragedy mixes with comedy as tales of marital breakdown and a bullying matron mix with nights on the town and days on ever-changing wards as the health service goes through various transitions and she does her best to acclimatise herself to them. Allied with her attempts to juggle her career with the demands of a challenging home life resides a bittersweet tale of love and loss as the winsome world of her parents gives way to a harsher one where family values are threatened by the addiction problems of her husband and daughter. Behind it all is her unmarried aunt who hides a heartbreaking secret that flies in the face of the morals of the time.

608 pages, Paperback

Published April 11, 2019

About the author

Born in the west of Ireland, Aubrey Malone was educated at University College, Dublin, graduating with a BA in English and philosophy. He did an M.A. in English, majoring in the literary style of Ernest Hemingway. He went on to write a biography of Hemingway for Robson Books in 1999. For ten years he was a teacher, before becoming a freelance journalist with various newspapers and magazines. He has written over fifty books, including the best-selling The Cynic's Dictionary (Prion). He mainly works in the non-fiction area but he has published two novels and a few collections of poetry and short stories. He has been writing professionally about the cinema since 1973.
His first book, Hollyweird (Michael O’Mara, 1994), focused on the eccentricities of film stars. He followed that up with two books on movies made in Ireland, Michael Collins and Ryan’s Daughter (GLI, both 1996). In 1997 he wrote The Rise and Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley (Leopold Publishing). Three years later he wrote I Was a Fugitive from a Hollywood Film Factory, subsequently reissued as Hollywood Trivia (Prion, 2004).
In 2011 he wrote Censoring Hollywood (McFarland), a book about the history of film censorship. The Defiant One, a biography of Tony Curtis (also McFarland) followed in 2013. In the same year he wrote Maureen O’Hara: A Biography for the University of Kentucky Press. McFarland also published Hollywood’s Second Sex, Malone’s history of the mistreatment of women in movies from 1900 to 1999, in 2016. ABC-CLIO published his study of spirituality in films, Sacred Profanity.
Writing Under the Influence, a study of the relationship between alcohol and literature for thirteen American authors, was published by McFarland in 2017. In 2018 he published a book about people who unfairly failed to win Oscars, And the Loser Is (Vernon Press). That year he also published The Elvis Diaries (One Media), a work of creative fiction based on fact. He is currently working on a biography of Sidney Lumet and an encyclopedia of LGBTQ films.