Book review: A writer’s journey through life

Evelyn Conlon speaking the event at the graveside of Patrick Kavanagh at anevent to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. ©Rory Geary

• Reading Rites: Books, writing and other things that matter
• Evelyn Conlon
• The Blackstaff Press, €14.99

Evelyn Conlon’s memoir mainly covers the years from 1970, the year she dropped out of University College Dublin and took a boat to Australia, to the present day. 

Political activism has always been part of her writing life and has made her the writer that she is, not, as she insists, “a feminist writer”, but “a writer who is a feminist”.

Her memoir is written with characteristic honesty and wry humour.

Evelyn has published four novels, four collections of stories and has edited four anthologies. She is
a member of Aosdána, and has been writer in residence at University College Dublin and in many other countries, including Australia and Israel. 

She was a founder of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, The Writer’s Centre in Parnell Square, and pioneered the provision of crèches in third-level institutions to enable mothers to study. 

Her work has been anthologised and translated into many languages. Yet outside Dublin literary circles she is not very well known.

She grew up in Co Monaghan and won a scholarship to St Louis Secondary School in Monaghan Town. 

Unlike most writers of memoirs, she dislikes talking about her childhood and explains why in her usual forthright way:

I have a deep suspicion of emotional incontinence, while at the same time realising that the keeping of secrets is how we as humans, manage to turn a blind eye to the most horrific abuses.

She had won another scholarship and had been looking forward to UCD. But it was the year that all the Arts students were moved from Stephen’s Green out to Belfield. 

There was no guidance or orientation for the students. Knowing no one and not even sure what a tutorial was, Conlon calls it “the most miserable experience of my life”.

However she quickly adopted another plan, and took any job she could find to save money for a ticket to Australia, simply because she had always been fascinated by that far-away place.

After three years of travelling, she came back on a three-month overland journey in a Sundowners bus from Kathmandu to West Berlin, incidents from which have often featured in her work.

In October, 1976 she arrived at Maynooth with a five-month-old baby to study for a BA. This explains why she pioneered the provision of crèches in third-level institutions, especially when she had a second baby the next year. 

She managed to get a degree, and more importantly, “I learned how to learn”.

She also learned how to find a role in an Ireland that was still emerging from years of domination by the Catholic church. 

Having split up with the father of her children, it was almost impossible to rent an apartment in Dublin as single mothers were assumed to be unrespectable. 

When she eventually found a place to live with tenure the relief was immense. Soon after she was joined there by her life partner, the musician and musicologist Fintan Vallely.

A weekend workshop in Galway led by Eavan Boland made her realise that poetry was not her strength and she switched to Bernard MacLaverty’s fiction workshop. 

Though from a younger generation, she worked alongside Nuala O’Faolain, Nell McCafferty, Mary Kenny, Mary Maher, and others in the early days of Ireland’s women’s movement. 

Hard to believe that they chanted “get your rosaries off my ovaries”, but those were desperate times. Helping in the background were the young lawyers Mary MacAleese and Mary Robinson. 

Never in their wildest dreams would these pioneering feminists have imagined that both women would become well-respected presidents of Ireland. 

Evelyn Conlon’s lively memoir brings it all back vividly to life.