Séamas O’Reilly: Finding humour in a childhood marked by the death of his mother
Séamas O’Reilly, author Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?
It is a subject most of us do our best to avoid but for Séamas O’Reilly, writing about death has had its upsides. His memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, is an account of growing up in a large family in rural Derry following the death of his mother Sheila’s death from cancer at the age of 43.
O’Reilly was only five years old at the time and the book takes its title from his cheerful greeting to mourners at his mother’s wake. It is a heartwarming and hilarious tribute to his mother and also his father Joe who was left with the unimaginable task of bringing up 11 children aged 2 to 17.
O’Reilly’s gift for weaving heartbreak and humour has struck a chord with readers since it was published earlier this year, with O’Reilly receiving hundreds of messages from people recounting their own experiences with grief.
“It seems that people have enjoyed reading something about the funnier side of being in a big family, or the more absurd things about the Irish way of death,” he says.
Among the raft of messages have been some poignant discoveries.
“I have been lucky enough to get a lot of messages, letters and even phone calls completely out of the blue from people who knew Mammy, which has been incredible. I have photographs of her taken just before she died when she was on a school trip in Germany which I had never seen before. She is wearing an utterly dreadful collection of shell suits, because it was 1991,” he says.
“She was a French and Irish teacher by profession, she had a knack for languages. She taught herself German so she could help out on this school trip. She already had so much on her plate — she had 11 kids and was going through cancer treatment, and she decided to learn German as well in the evenings. I had told that story in the book but it never occurred to me that there were pictures of that. There are pictures of her standing in beer halls and pointing at mountains.”
O’Reilly’s book has been shortlisted in the Dubray biography of the year category of this year’s An Post Irish Book awards, which is likely to bring even more attention to his father, Joe, who emerges as the hero of the book, as he attempts to marshall the chaos of bringing up 11 children.
“My dad is loving his newfound fame, he is getting phone calls from every person mentioned in the book — or everyone who thinks they are mentioned in the book, because I do change some of the names. The nicest thing about that is that it gives people an excuse to call up and tell him how much they appreciate him. For Irish men of a certain age, it is not a thing you usually do — to say to someone ‘hey, you’re great’.”
O’Reilly, who is now based in London, says he wanted to write a book that captured the reality of his experiences.
“You could presume what a terrible, terrible time I had and you could make a very worthy, quite depressing short film about it, or whatever. And that just hasn’t been my experience. My experience with life, grief and a family, good and bad has been one with loads of laughs and absurdity in it,” he says.
The Irish way of handling death, particularly the weirdly mundane rituals of the wake, is also superbly captured in the book.
“I don’t think there is much to laugh at about my mother’s death at 43 but there were things I laughed through — silly things, like the fact that there were 300 people in my house who didn’t know where to go or what to say; family friends who had come over, looking sheepishly through our cupboards because they didn’t know where to put the whisk they had just been using; this pyramid of sandwiches that would make Mrs Doyle blush.
"Part of me thinks it is the last thing you would ever want to do, to have people tramping through your house for two days. But you make 600 cups of tea and slowly but surely you get back into the waking world. The whole process is ritualistically giving you a distraction and also an engagement when really every fibre in you being is telling you that you just want to go and hide in a hole.”
While O’Reilly is a relatively new talent in literary terms, he entered the Twitter hall of fame with a now legendary 46-tweet thread in which he recounted how he ended up serving drinks to President Mary McAleese while on the drug ketamine [as brilliant and bonkers as it sounds]. It led to an article in the New York Times comparing him to Flann O’Brien and lots of work opportunities, including the publishing deal for Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? which he had already written in draft form.
“I was working in a job I absolutely hated, inputting figures on spreadsheets — like a lot of Irish people in London, I had a series of jobs but none of them had kicked on. The best thing about that thread was it enabled me to take up writing full-time — all because I replied to this one comment asking ‘what was your worst day in work?’.
"It was a story I’ve been telling for years. By the time I got to tweet 12 or 13, my phone was unusable, so many notifications were coming in. I had a few tweets that had done well before but this was just bananas. I think by the end of the day, I had added 30,000 followers, all the tweets added up together have had 80 million impressions or something stupid.”
He didn’t allow the Twitter fame inflate his ego, either.
“The really good thing about having so many things I can trace back to that one experience is that it frees you of a lot of petty vanity. It was like capturing lightning in a bottle, there was a massive amount of sheer, blind, crazy, luck that it was seen by all these people. I see tweets that are really funny, they don’t hit. Every day that I write to — just about — earn a living, I don’t take for granted. I constantly think back to that morning and how it was a complete fluke. I have nothing but respect for the medium and everything it has given to me.”
That includes the outpouring of support he has received since writing the book, which continues to have a profound effect on him.
“I have had well into the thousands of responses, even just people saying ‘I’m reading this book and I like it’, which is great. Then there has been hundreds of people getting in touch with their own stories, especially on the Irish side, people with big families, people who have suffered bereavement, which is everybody really. I have answered every single one because it takes something to reach out and say those things. It was something I couldn’t have imagined happening, and I couldn’t imagine how moving or overwhelming I would find it.”
* Did Ye Hear Mammy Died, by Séamas O’Reilly, is published by Little, Brown. An Post Irish Book Award winners will be announced on Nov 23. People can vote for their favourite authors and books at www.irishbookawards.ie
- Belonging: A Memoir of Place, Beginnings and One Woman's Search for Truth and Justice for the Tuam Babies – Catherine Corless with Naomi Linehan (Hachette Books Ireland).
- Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? – Séamas O'Reilly (Little, Brown Book Group).
- Gas Man – Colin Black (HarperCollins Ireland).
- Boy 11963 : An Irish Industrial School Childhood and an Extraordinary Search for Home - John Cameron with Kathryn Rogers (Hachette Books Ireland).
- Openhearted – Ann Ingle (Sandycove).
- Rememberings – Sinéad O'Connor (Sandycove).
