Patricia Burke Brogan's memoir of an extraordinary life
Quiet, determined, fearless and with a mischevious sense of humour, Patricia Burke Brogan has long been a force for change in Irish society through her work as a writer, teacher and artist. The city resident is best known as the author of the 1992 groundbreaking play Eclipsed, which dealt with the shameful reality of Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, but that is just one, albeit long, strand in a rich and varied life.
Patricia’s just-published book, Memoir with Grykes and Turloughs, captures her period as a novice in the Sisters of Mercy in Galway and the reasons why she wrote Eclipsed, which has been staged all over the world and won many awards since being premiered in Galway in 1992.
Her writing style in the memoir is immediate and visual and frequently infused with a wonderful wry humour and sense of mischief.
The book is written in a series of flashbacks and doesn’t have a conventional narrative structure, which felt like the right way for her to do it.
But all the important details are there, such as her birth in Kildysart, South West Clare, which her family left when she was a young child after her Garda sergeant father was transferred to Moylough in Galway.
“I didn’t want to leave there and still feel I belong there,” she says of Co Clare.