John MacKenna set to launch fascinating memoir

 RENOWNED author John MacKenna is set to launch a fascinating memoir in Athy.

Father, Son and Brother Ghost is a book about brotherly love and a meditation on the relationships between the author’s father Jack who died in 1999, brother Jarlath who died in 2005 and himself. John explained that he wrote the book to focus on the “quite different” relationships with Jack and Jarlath. “It was an attempt to finish conversations that hadn’t been finished with both of them really,” he said.

John, who grew up in Castledermot, recalled that he had quite a “fraught” relationship with his father in his teens, which carried over into his twenties and maybe a little bit into his thirties.

“I grew up in a house that was… it was a dramatic household where there were often very dramatic discussions or rows between my parents. I mean, nothing physical, it was just verbals. And they all seemed – it seemed to me that they all stemmed from alcohol,” he said. “My father wasn't a big drinker but he wasn't a great drinker in the sense that I suppose his personality changed when he drank… there was never any violence or anything like that, but he just became a different person and my mother never drank at all, so it inevitably led to conflict in the house.

“I found myself, particularly when my older brother and sister had gone away to school and then gone away to college, I found myself as a kid kind of stuck on the frontline between these two people who were having this quite fractious relationship at times.” He added: “When I look back now in retrospect, when I look back at his own childhood where his mother died when he was one, his stepmother died when he was six, and effectively he was brought up by his older sister... when I look back I can see that something like that would have a huge emotional effect on somebody and I suppose would colour their behaviour for life in the sense of never feeling that you can get too close to people because they may well be gone the next day.” Jarlath, meanwhile, was ten years older than John and was away in boarding school, then he went off to college and became a teacher.

“He lasted for three weeks as a teacher and he went back and did medicine, which was a hell of a jump,” John said with a laugh. “I suppose for a lot of the years I didn't see too much of him. When he was in boarding school he'd be home during the holidays, when he was in college he'd be home for a week at Christmas and he'd be home for a week at the end of the summer when he came back from England from working. And yet I suppose I felt that any time he was in the house or around, I felt – because of the fact that both my brother and sister were away, and I to an extent was an only child, I felt when he came back home that I didn't have to deal with that kind of fractious relationship between my parents. 

"Somebody else could take responsibility for it. And it seemed to be just water off a duck's back to him, whereas for me I had a sense of feeling a responsibility for sorting out whatever problems there were between my parents.” Jarlath qualified as a doctor in 1970 and he and his wife emigrated to the States where he worked as a gynaecologist. He was retired about a year when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. “He died fortunately quite quickly, in a matter of months, really before the disease got to its worst. I have to say I felt a sense of relief for him when he died,” John said. 

“I just felt what was coming wasn't going to be particularly easy to deal with.” John has been working on this book seriously since 2009 and has redrafted it many, many times. “Until such time as I was absolutely sure that I had said what I wanted to say, I didn't want it to get out into the world,” he said. “The only two people who read it along the way were my wife Angela and my sister [Dolores]. I did give it to my sister and inevitably... she didn't ask me to change anything in it, she did say that her memories – she's slightly older than I am – her memories of childhood, as they always are for every child, they're slightly different from mine. But both of them read it and at that point I felt nobody jumped up and down and said 'you can't say that'.

“I hope that towards the end of the book, that it's a redemptive book in the sense that I feel that I have finished those conversations with Jarlath that I never had finished and that I've finished the conversations with Jack that I never had with him.” Father, Son & Brother Ghost is in bookshops in Naas, Kilcullen, Kildare and Newbridge alongside Behan's in Castledermot and Winkle's in Athy. The official launch will take place in Athy Library on Thursday 11 July at 7pm.