Memoir: Take one clever, charismatic priest. Demote him without telling him why, then let him take his wounded self to Italy on study leave. Put a pretty 22-year-old American in his path. Allow the inevitable to happen.
Now, fast-forward 40 years. Charismatic priest dead, his children adult-to-middle-aged. The mother of those children writes memoir, "blabbing my sex life with a frisky cleric into a book".
Those may be the chronological facts, but the truth of this extraordinary memoir lies elsewhere. This is no Annie Murphy self- portrait of victimhood at the hands of a failed celibate. Even in her 20s, Flavia Alaya was no victim, and now, in her 60s, she is neither peddling her priest-loving past into a money-making book nor seeking the understanding and sympathy of readers. Under the Rose, a strange hybrid of forms and styles, is at core a relentlessly honest exploration of truth, memory and relationships.
At the centre is Father Harry Browne, a legend of New York in the 1960s, fighting for the rights of the poor, leading change at a time of all-pervasive change. Browne was a historian with a great book in him that was never to be written, because the cares and intellectual riches and pleasures of the day excused him from its writing.
Browne could easily convince himself that the value of his work precluded his leaving the priesthood, while the value of his relationship and growing family prevented him from living the totality of the priestly life. Almost half a century later, it is fair to posit the possibility that he needed the priesthood at least as much as it needed him. It was the ostensible constraints of the priesthood which, paradoxically, created him as a public figure. Just as a blind man once rejected the possibility of surgery to restore his sight, saying "blind, I'm an achieving hero; sighted, I would be disabled", so, within the priesthood, Browne could cast as heroic dissidence what in other times might have been no more than contumacy. Against the expectations set by the 1950s Bing Crosby clerical stereotype, this priest's shining anger and well-placed profanity made him the darling of the TV cameras.
"He was wonderful," Alaya writes, "another being when he was up there, no one sure just when he might forge on the smithy of his soul some slight but jolting impropriety. He was onto the news- making power of a phrase, beginning to see how the publicity shots were called and getting bolder about calling them . . . 'Damned planners can't even get out of their limos to see what shit people are living in. It's time,' Browne would say - always careful to mix "shit" and Latin in the same speech - 'to start factoring in the vox populi.' "
His young lover bore his children - three of them - built an academic career and, she writes, "took his guilt the way a bodyguard would take a bullet". Partly because of her feminism, partly because of her reverence for his role and influence, she seems never to have fought for her right to be recognised as his wife, never to have demanded that he leave the priesthood:
I'd granted him the option to equivocate, which meant the option to walk away again if he chose. I didn't expect him to choose it. I didn't expect him to choose at all, and certainly not to offer to marry me, which in any case I would almost certainly have declined.
Instead, warmed by the "lovely false radiance of self-abnegation", she spent the turbulent 1960s worshipping at his shrine. Significantly, when he eventually left the priesthood, opting for life with her and a career in trivially venomous academia, the patina of legend left him, even in his partner's eyes. Post-priesthood, when he occasionally appeared on television, she felt no thrill, because, she writes: "He looked too crumpled, and chubby, and old."
For Browne, there was life after legend, but it was inevitably a life overshadowed by the earlier times and the man imprinted by those times.
That this memoir has been decades in gestation, suffering one setback after another on the way to final publication, speaks to its disadvantageous uniqueness. It is neither biography nor autobiography nor apologia. It varies wildly in style and pace. In the early sections, every sentence is packed with statement, commentary and reflection. Later, a workmanlike reporter's brevity takes over. For the most part, Alaya writes for herself, yet every now and then she speaks past the proscenium arch of her prose directly to the reader. It is uneven, over-abundant, riveting. And at the end, the inference is inescapable: it is not just the dream deferred that shrivels like a raisin in the sun. Sometimes the dream fulfilled shrivels, likewise.
Terry Prone is a director of Carr Communications. Her most recent novel, Dancing With the Angel, is published by Marino Books.
Under the Rose: A Confession By Flavia Alaya New Island Books, 459pp, €15