'I was probably too raw': The joys, sorrows and truths of Patrick Freyne

Journalist Patrick Freyne talks to Pat Fitzpatrick about anxiety, Cork and why he chose now to talk about himself in his frank memoirs.

Patrick Freyne. Picture: Chris Maddaloni

I nearly started crying listening back to my interview with Patrick Freyne. There was just something in his voice that I didn’t catch first time round on the phone, when he was talking about not having kids.

“It just didn’t happen,” he said. “I wrote about it because I was reckoning with it, and mourned it a little bit. When you get to a certain age, you look around and everyone around has kids, and it looks like a default. Apart from anything else, there is a sense of you dropping out of sync. I had a really strange dream, a post-apocalyptic landscape and I was minding my nephew and I felt really happy when I woke up from the dream and it was a dream about parenthood, you know.”