Saturday, January 07, 2012
BORN in America, Grene spent his childhood on a farm in County Wicklow.
His parents were both academics. “And I went into the family trade,” says Gene. “It wasn’t altogether intentional. It was one thing after another. I was in college. I loved literature. And at the end of four years, I decided I wanted to go on with it.” As professor of English literature at Trinity College Dublin, Grene has published three academic books.
Who is Nicholas Grene?
Date/Place of Birth: November 6, 1947, in Illinois, America.
Education: Belfast Royal Academy. Trinity College, BA, then a PhD at Cambridge university.
Home: Ballinaclash, County Wicklow.
Family: Wife, Eleanor, four children and two grandchildren.
The Day Job: Professor of English literature at Trinity College Dublin.
Hobbies: Farming, reading.
Favourite Writers: Jane Austen; Anton Chekhov; John McGahern.
Top Writing Tip: Keep going. “Writing the memoir was very different to academic writing. It was a lot easier. I did sketch out a structure in advance, but mainly I just wrote down what I remembered.”
Web/Twitter: Neither.
Next Book: “It’s back to academic writing. I’m hoping to write a book called Home on the Stage, about domestic spaces in modern drama.”
THE DEBUT
Nothing Quite Like It. An American Irish Childhood. Somerville Press: €14.99.
Kindle: Not available.
Arriving in County Wicklow in the 1950s, the Grene family settled on a farm. They embraced rural life, but Grene’s father continued to teach in America for part of the year, and Grene was never happy at school. His parents’ divorce, when he was 13, shocked and embarrassed him.
“I wrote the memoir for the family, and because we’d been in the village for 50 years. I felt the potential interest was the experience of living in the 1950s on a farm, but with this slightly peculiar view of someone who was not fitting in easily into any of the sub-groups of the local community.”
The Verdict: A vivid memoir showing the eccentricities of 1950s Ireland. Told with great affection, humour and charm.
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