Venance Agnero
English 1101-015
03/07/14
Memoir of John Mc Gahern
In his book, the writer relates his life at his
early age with his family, which therefore for me, is a story of his coming
age.
In his book, John Mc Gahern describes the place of
his childhood through those terms and phrases such as:’’The soil in Leitrim is
poor, underneable is doub, a blue-grey modeling clay, a compacted gavel, the
fields between the lakes are small, ash, blackthorn, alder, sally rowan, wild
chery, green aok, syncamore, the lanes that link them under the iron mountains
are narrow.’’
Through that description, the writer gives me the
image of a suburb or village where he grew up. In his story, he also relates
how he had an amazing childhood, specially his first years of school, when he
says:” I don’t think I learned anything at school, though I had a copybook I
was proud of. I was too young and spoiled, and spoiled further by the older
girls who competed in mothering me during the school breaks.” Through his story, the writer reminds me those
wonderful times I had in my childhood.
The ideal audience for this book is the reader and
specially who will be attracted or interested by that story as much as it can
remind to the reader his pass.
The specific scene in his book is his life when he
was three years old, the writer says:” we lived with my mother, our
grandmother, and our grandfather in a small bungalow a mile outside the town
and our father lived in a barrack twenty miles away. “
His childhood remember me about mine, I was living with my mother in my
village, I lived there with my grandmother and my grandfather, my mother’s
parents. My father was living in the city, mother also was living in the city,
but my mother was spending more times in the village I thought because she was
always there.
So Mc Gahern story is similar to what I could write
as memoir of my life before my fifth years old.
The writer put specific description and details on
his scene such as “bungalow and barrack”, to teach us that he did not come from
rich family, but poor. That scene is important to the writer, because this is
where he came from.
As change in his story, the writer’s father
remarried after being single for years, fact that was surprising to writer’s uncles
and parents.
I learnt from that memoir that, writing a memoir
requires deep details of the story. The writing has to be free, nothing has to
be private or hidden if it is a part of the story. This is the way the writer
can have more intension from the readers for his story. People are more
fascinated by a story when it deeply told, when it displays all aspects we can
imagine, which gives a beauty of the story. So writing a memoir is to write
about your pass in whole or specific part of your life in whole.
