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In Amongst Women, John McGahern—like any writer—tells the story using a particular narrational style. Let’s consider the opening paragraph: “As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters. This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children of their own in Dublin and London. Now they could not let him slip away.” Who is the subject thinking this and then writing it? Well, it’s s

Who am I? That’s a question that self-reflective people ask themselves again and again as they move through life. The answer is more than a name; it is a persona that includes personality traits, abilities, physical attributes, interests, and social roles. I am the author of this blog. I am tall, interested in writing and reading. I am a husband, a father, a dog owner. (a bully). If fiction desires to appear realistic, characters should be shown as having an identity, no? An

Immediately after the section in Amongst Women that depicts the last meeting between Moran and McQuaid, there is a paragraph break. Then the reader is treated to fourteen pages of gorgeous lyrical writing telling the story of how Moran got together with Rose Brady. “Rose Brady had come home from Glasgow to nurse her father and stayed on irresolutely after his death, one day stretching into another…Sometimes she had too strong of a sense of being locked into the life of the fa

Last week, we started thinking about the structure of Amongst Women—the way it establishes a present time at the beginning when Michael Moran’s daughters have returned to the family home to break him out of a decline. “You’ll have to shape up, Daddy. You can’t go on like this. You’re giving us no help. We can’t get you better on our own.” Then the story moves back in time. From the present, which I believe occurs around 1960, it goes back to the last time Jimmy McQuaid came t

This week, a new story, best beloved, Irishman John McGahern’s 1990 novel, Amongst Women. Great choice! Yay! Thank you. John McGahern is one of my favorite writers— Probably why you picked him. —and Amongst Women was the novel that brought him international acclaim. Short listed for the Booker Prize in 1990, it is the story of a large middle-class family in Ireland, the Morans, a family with an ageing and troubled patriarch, Michael, who was a soldier in Ireland’s Civil War i