assignment on a memoir

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.