Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dan Barry has chosen to launch, and base, his much-praised memoir in Ireland, reports Sheila Sullivan
When a tourist guide to Ireland had the gall to describe Gort as "a dreary little market town", Dan Barry saw red.
The New York Times columnist is a regular visitor to the south Galway town, a few miles from his mother's birthplace, Shanaglish. "I remember being offended," he said. "To me it's real Ireland and this is where my mother was from."
Barry shot back by writing an article about Gort for the Sunday travel section of the Times, including Thoor Ballylee, Coole Park, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and mentioning his family link. A literary agent read the piece and invited him to lunch.
He challenged Dan to write about his upbringing in Deer Park, Long Island and his bond with his mother's home place.
The result is Pull Me Up: A Memoir, published today by Norton. It has been called lyrical and incandescent in the US.
Barry, whose twice-weekly "About New York" columns chronicle the heroism of everyday life, is the real deal. In 1994 he shared a Pulitzer Prize with the Providence Journal's investigative team for exposing court corruption. In 2003 he won the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for deadline reporting for a story he wrote on the first anniversary of September 11th.
His background, while ordinary in some ways, is unusual in others. Or maybe it's the way he tells it. His father Gene was "an avid student of the paranormal" who was invited by a university professor "to participate in a panel on the subject of extraterrestrial life," Dan writes in Pull Me Up. "Other families went on traditional outings to the bowling alley or the miniature golf course; we went in search of UFOs."
One summer evening, all four Barry children were piled into the car in their pyjamas for an 130 km trip to Wanaque, New Jersey, "where alien spaceships supposedly had been spotted hovering over a local reservoir". As his father searched the skies, his mother Noreen "calmly sipped her coffee, as though she had been conducting UFO stakeouts all her life."
Gene Barry suffered from migraines that were "like uppercuts to the head". Dan's mother, born Noreen Minogue, was sent to an aunt in Brooklyn after being orphaned in Ireland at 15. Her response to Gene's migraines was to write a letter to Frank Capra, director of It's a Wonderful Life: "Dear Mr Capra, My husband has been a fan of yours for many years and some time ago he read your book, The Name Above the Title. Well in this book you mention 'cluster migraine'. That's the reason for this letter." Capra wrote back, saying that his headaches had lasted for 10 years and had stopped of their own accord. Gene's lasted for nearly 20.
Dan left home to attend St Bonaventure University in Allegany, New York, where he met Mary Trinity from Maplewood, New Jersey, whose parents, honest to God, were named Mary and Joseph. As the courtship began, Dan wondered if he would have to make the sign of the cross before he kissed her. On their first date they went to see Apocalypse Now. They married in 1991 and have two daughters, Nora (7) and Grace (2).
In February 1999 Dan's mother died of lung cancer, aged 61, and his unflinching account of her death represents some of the most powerful writing in the book. "Danny, pull me up. Pull me up, Danny," his mother said in her morphine dementia, when she felt as though she were falling.
Within six months Dan himself, then aged 41, was diagnosed with cancer. He had "a tumour in my trachea that had doctors whispering hospice, not hope". Chemotherapy or radiation: door number one or door number two. He had a serious regimen of both. "Oh Jesus, Oh Mary, Oh Mom. Pull me up," he writes.
In February 2000 he got a clean bill of health and in September began work on his memoir. He wrote for more than three years, in the mornings before work and on weekends. "I thought about were I to die at 41, I thought of all the stories that would die with me," he said. He told himself: "You've been given a second chance. Why don't you put down on paper those stories?"
September 11th, 2001 changed his life again, and he covered the story for the Times long after the media focus switched to Afghanistan. His desk in the newsroom on West 43rd Street is near a window facing south, and for months he could smell the burning World Trade Centre site. But work appeared to be his salvation.
His next book will not be about himself. It will be a novel about the seventh son of a seventh son, who is raised in America and imbued with a healing power.
• Dan Barry will read from Pull Me Up at 6 p.m. tomorrow at Charlie Byrne's bookshop, Galway.
