The heights of the 1990s bestseller lists have been scaled by something so unexpected, so incongruous, that you can only reason that in the feel-good 1990s, we're feeling good by feeling bad. The miserable Irish childhood memoir is to the 1990s what the label-conscious sex and shopping novel was to the 1980s. The word "Gucci" has been replaced by "Christian Brother" and the Jackie Collins sex scene by the odd priestly hand down the pants. In the international popular imagination, the words "Ireland" and "childhood" now summon up a predictable literary lexicon: shocking poverty; sexual abuse; dying children; stinking outdoor toilets (particularly shocking for readers in the Hamptons); pig's heads; alcoholic fathers; saintly mothers and general misery. As Frank McCourt said in Angela's Ashes, there is nothing as miserable as an Irish Catholic childhood. Buy the book, and you can have one too.
The international reading public's appetite for earthy Irish nostalgia has never been greater. That people could be so poor and yet so literate, darling, makes the memoir the sexy literary accessory - the Prada bagof emotional baggage. And so it is that Peter Sheridan's new book, 44 - a Dublin Memoir (published next month), arrives with perfect timing.
This sentimental book about a romanticised childhood is described by its publishers as "a wonderful, funny, poignant memoir, which has already become an international rights success, and which has all the appeal of Angela's Ashes and Reading in the Dark". Well, we know what's going on here. More bullying Christian brothers, more sexual abuse, more dying children, more outdoor toilets, another tough and insensitive father and a long-suffering mother driven mad with grief. Nary a pig's head, though.
In panning his childhood for literary gold, Sheridan follows in the footsteps of an exclusive club of Irish memoir writers, among them Frank McCourt, Seamus Deane (Reading in the Dark), Nuala O'Faolain (Are You Somebody?), Dermot Healy (The Bend for Home) and Hugh Leonard (Home Before Night). Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory is an intellectual exercise that miraculously doesn't fit into the miserable Irish childhood pattern - proving that there is hope for us all. Some Irish childhood memoirs are valuable in that they give the sense that they had to be written for the writer's very emotional survival, as does O'Faolain's healing work. Her memoir was a logical extension of the sensibility revealed by her newspaper column. But the fashion for the confessional memoir of the tortured, middle-aged male is a different thing altogether. Spilling your guts is fast becoming a compulsory hurdle in the Irish writer's career path, leading you to wonder, how many more of these spiller-thrillers are being written in garrets all over Dublin. It's got to the stage where anyone without a miserable childhood should create one - and fast. One writer admitted privately to having invented one aspect of his memoir for aesthetic purposes, a method which paid off in literary acclaim. For this writer, memoir-writing was as much about structure and artifice as it was about self-exposure and revelation.
How truthful is a memoir, anyway? I've never met a three-year-old carrying around a notebook and tape-recorder for research purposes (although judging by the success of the memoir maybe this would be a good idea). We rely on memory, which is notoriously unreliable. As Nabokov made it his life's work to explore, we recreate our memories as we recall them. So why not make up a memoir, instead of struggling to make up fiction? It's hardly a crime if there is actually little difference between the two. There's more to it, obviously, namely the question: why are middle-aged men doing the literary equivalent of the Jerry Springer Show? Because, with one or two exceptions, they're trying to deal with their mothers. McCourt's mother is a pathetic two-dimensional figure, victimised by her alcoholic husband and weeping over a succession of tiny corpses. Tortured guilt over the Irish mammy is oxygen to the flame of the memoir. Angela's Ashes can be read as a 426-page justification for McCourt abandoning his mother and two younger brothers to pursue his own happiness in the US. But let's get serious for a moment and look at the deeper psychological reasons that drive men to explore their relationships with their mammies. It's a psychological truism that in middle-age men start feeling the urge to relive their infancy. A memoir, though, is rather different to buying a sports car and having an extramarital affair - even if it can earn you enough money to do both, in style. In her popular psychology book, The Way We Live Now, Maureen Gaffney writes that middle-age brings an urge to reconnect the older, wiser, staid and stagnating self to the world of youth and creativity. As a childhood memoir writer, you may never find the fountain of youth, but you can at least dip into the well.
Mid-life is also the time when men begin to see holes appearing in the testosterone-driven macho posturing that has dominated the first half of their lives. A more feminine, introspective approach is needed to cope with the deeper issues of middle-age. Emotions avoided for decades bounce to the surface. As Sheridan describes it, his childhood world was peopled by "men proving that they were men and women proving that they loved their children". In the Irish male's memoir, being redeemed from the limitations of manliness is a matter of men proving how much they loved their mothers. To put it simply, middle-aged men get in touch with their feminine sides by writing bestselling memoirs. When the journey back to the womb is genuine and the writing works, the effect can be stunning. In Reading in the Dark, which won both The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Irish Literature Prize in 1997, Seamus Deane goes so far inside his mother's madness that you wonder how he ever emerged intact. To avoid being devoured, other male writers keep their mothers at a safe, clinical distance, like Dermot Healy, in The Bend for Home. Another approach is to reject the mother entirely. Hugh Leonard, in his uber-memoir of 1979, complains that his mother's "delirium knew no bounds" and recalls, "hating my mother and despising my Da for his weakness in not defying her".
Sheridan, adding his voice to the throng, describes leaving the emotional orbit of his longsuffering mother to identify with his bullying father, only to be rejected by him when he dares to assert his own identity. When the 15-year-old Peter is sexually abused by one of the family's four male lodgers, he blames his father for sending him "out without instructions". Dazed and confused, young Peter has to come to terms with his sexual identity. It's probably no coincidence that both Sheridan's and McCourt's books contain humorous scenes of cross-dressing, and at very similar points in the narrative.
This sexual ambiguity - am I like my mother or my father? - is resolved in both books, when the cross-dressing episodes are followed by the boys' first sexual experiences with girls their own age. Parents who want to avoid being the subject of a literary expose should handle their son's sensitivities carefully, or else risk hearing a son announce that he has a memoir in gestation, with the words, "Mammy, I'm poignant."
Apart from a miserable childhood, it also helps to have some fame on your side already, if you want to have your confessional epistle published. The publishers, MacMillan, are marketing Sheridan's memoir partly on his theatre reputation and his association with his brother Jim, the film-maker, who is known in the book as "Shea". Surprisingly, Sheridan makes no mention of the passion for theatre which led him to become a writer and director until the last few pages of the book. Then we learn that the Sheridan brothers were introduced to the world of theatre not by any yearning in their own lives, but by their father's own mid-life crisis. Their father dyed his hair black and reinvented himself by embarking on an amateur career in community drama, bringing his sons along for the ride. At the St Laurence O'Toole's Musical and Dramatic Society, Peter and Jim perform O'Casey's Shadow of a Gun- man, and Sheridan is electrified by sensing his life being lived on stage.
"In the play the characters paraded into the tenement just like so many had paraded into our lives in the kitchen of 44 . . . It was like 10 years of 44 realised in under two hours."
Art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates art. Life makes sense when lived backwards, but rarely the other way around. For the Irish male memoir writer, reliving your childhood is a way finding yourself - with the help of a good literary agent. Although, in the end, you'll have only Mammy to thank. Unless, of course, she gave you a happy childhood, in which case, forget it: your memoirs won't sell.