Book review: Oona Frawley brings readers on a raw exploration of the past

As both her parents are now dead, Frawley feels able to tackle the thorny subject of her father’s alcoholism, his struggles as an actor, and her mother’s reasons for enduring dysfunction for so long

Author Oona Frawley’s delicate memoir skilfully confronts her father’s impact on her life.

• This Interim Time 
• Oona Frawley 
• Lilliput, €16.95

Writing a memoir is brave. In novels, writers find ingenious ways of talking about themselves, using proxies and high drama to replay difficult moments in their lives. But the memoirist must dispense with all these bells and whistles, and confront unvarnished realities head on.

In This Interim Time, however, Oona Frawley is less interested in talking about herself than her parents: Irish actors who emigrated to America and led their only child on a peripatetic bohemian adventure. Frawley — whose debut novel Flight was published in 2014 — was born in the US and raised in New York, but moved to Ireland in 1999, had a family, and settled down.

As a writer, she became obsessed with imagining her parents’ lives before they had her, their childhoods and courtship, the complex reasons for their flight. As both are now dead, Frawley feels able to tackle the thorny subject of her father’s alcoholism, his struggles as an actor, and her mother’s reasons for enduring dysfunction for so long.

As a child in Manhattan, Frawley has pleasant memories of a cosy apartment complex on the East River, filled with warm and colourful neighbours.

As the child of wandering parents, she is obsessed with houses, safe places, the tenuous concept of home.

“Beautiful houses,” Frawley explains, “always evoke in me an indefinable longing.”

She speaks movingly about a childhood doll’s house that became, in miniature, a refuge: “I disappeared into it: There are details of those rooms I recall more vividly than my childhood apartment.”

To complicate matters, Oona was the daughter of wistful immigrants. As a consequence, “I would always be the child who heard of ‘home’ as something far off in place and time”.

'This Interim Time', by Oona Frawley, shares descriptions of a man haunted by the childhood loss of his mother and sister, a struggling actor who lived in his performances.

She shares an amusing memory of her realisation that acting was a precarious business. Her father was “not always successful — not even mostly successful. He and his friends discussed bombed auditions so often and with such relishing of detail that when I was seven I decided the theatre was not for me… There were guffaws and much hilarity when I told them that I would be a writer.”

She turned out to be an elegant one: On a journey to Mayo with her young children, she describes “breaking the journey at Strokestown so they could empty their legs of some of the eagerness to arrive”.

Switching constantly between the present and the past, Frawley contemplates the mysteries of acting, and recalls the way her parents would communicate emotionally while reading lines. There is a slide from a film they made together, which becomes an icon of recollection. “They were beautiful and marked by lost glamour in the way that parents can be when you see them as having distinct lives, because they are not you…”

After her father’s funeral, she has regrets about “the bitter disappointment that kept me from delivering a eulogy”. At that point, she says, she “was angry with him, resentful of his drinking, protective of my mother whose life had been so changed by his alcoholism”.

There is a tragic quality to her descriptions of a man haunted by the childhood loss of his mother and sister, a struggling actor who lived in his performances, and “in some ways felt homeless without a role”.

Frawley is painfully honest throughout, and speaks with raw candour about the experience of motherhood, the horror of a miscarriage, the early deaths of family and friends.

There was a cloud, too, over the circumstances in which her parents had left Ireland: A home gambled away, a job lost through drinking. Frawley’s relationship with her mother appears to have been strong, and perhaps her primary reason for writing this memoir was to reconcile the contradictions in her father’s character, his kindness and carelessness, and find a way to forgive him. She succeeds, I think, and in the process has created a beautiful, delicate, skilfully-meandering book.