Inishowen is Ireland’s end, the island’s northern headland exposed to the scour of salt water from the north Atlantic. Faced with wild weather and lit by stormy sky, the setting is perfect for Kathy Donaghy’s turbulent and moving memoir, Finding My Wild.
Thanks to history and geography Inishowen has become one of Ireland’s lesser-known peninsulas, less travelled than modern-day Dingle, Mizen and Beara. Partly this is because even on a warm day the cold air cuts, partly because the communities who live there have such a deep experience of migration themselves. Donaghy was one such local who left school in Carndonagh for university and a career in journalism. That life led to travel, marriage and an urge to return that rose like a wave that threatened at times to overwhelm her and her growing family.
Finding My Wild is a deep and honest account of these unsettled years, which turn around Donaghy’s complex experiences of motherhood. She shares her stories with a clarity of self-reflection that is painful to read, and her observations on love, compulsion and forgiveness are powerful within a book that is rooted in the natural life of rural Ireland. This is a study of foxes, badgers, cormorants, seals and dolphins as much as it is a summary of education, home life and the health service.
Its poignant parts are those moments by the sea, which move from childhood adventures in rock pools to the adult plunge into cold water off Culdaff, which brings the memoir to a flowing close.
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Donaghy describes Lough Foyle as an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, turbulent and powerful. The same might hold for her book
Donaghy’s descriptions of being in the water are wonderful. Swimming is hardly the word to cover the body feeling the surge of sensations that seawater invites, and Donaghy captures this variousness with a delight that is equivalent to hope after all the pages of trauma and grief before.
There are passing glimpses of other histories too, of salmon fishing and seasonal migrations, human and bird, which hint at the diversity of Inishowen as a place in and of itself. Donaghy describes Lough Foyle as an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, turbulent and powerful. The same might hold for her book, Finding My Wild – a memoir and a reflection, a testimony and an act of self-forgiveness that we might all read and learn from.
