Memoir captures an ordinary person's experience of The Troubles in Derry
Darran Anderson , his latest book is 'Inventory - A Family Portrait of Derry’s Troubled Past' for Mark Twomey
THERE have been many excellent memoirs written from the northern nationalist perspective. Among the best are Bernadette Devlin McAliskey’s The Price Of My Soul, Dennis Donoghue’s Warrenpoint, Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, and Tony Doherty’s tender and moving This Man’s Wee Boy.
What historians - with their attention to the ‘big picture’, their fixation with dates, statistics, conferences, legislation and (usually) ‘great’ men at war - rarely capture is the psyche of ordinary people, the raw communal experience and reaction to critical events (which also drives and determines history), the multi-layered humanity of a community, which the memoir can crucially make up for.
