Tracing a tragic life in New York
IN 1966, Eamon Morrissey travelled to New York for a Broadway production of Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!. He was 23 years of age. He was travelling on the city’s subway system when he began reading a story in the New Yorker magazine that stopped him in his tracks.
“The hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up because it was too close to the bone. The story, although I didn’t realise it at the time, was by Maeve Brennan. Although she lived in New York for most of her life, her short stories were largely set in the little house she was brought up in Cherryfield Avenue in Ranelagh, Dublin.
