I often experience a sort of sinking feeling when asked to review a comedy memoir, as I anticipate another narrator who eschews authenticity for a cheap gag. In the case of the above two titles, I needn’t have worried.
Doran’s memoir begins, as any good book does, with boobs. From here, the ginger-pubed “great grubber” delivers the most apt depiction of Irish female Millennial adolescence. We accompany the author through the angst and embarrassment of navigating the perilous tightrope of being neither a “fridget” nor a “slut”, where she is to become pregnant and give birth 13 days before her Leaving Cert.
Doran’s memoir is one of my favourite books of this year. Reading her depiction of young motherhood and her career trajectory felt akin to reading great Young Adult literature. Here is authentic, affectionate prose that values feeling over ornate similes. And while our author doesn’t employ humour as a tool to deflect from the truth, she is – as you would expect – absolutely gas. Her line, “This was still the era in Ireland when we all thought Montessori was a type of pasta”, still has me giggling.
Sundermann’s guide to the countryside is, on the other hand, not memoir but a concept book, almost sketch comedy in form. After “two weeks’ lived experience of the countryside”, Sundermann has become equipped to educate city-dwelling readers on this beguiling other world.
The Fall of Man: a Christmas short story by Donal Ryan
Kevin Power: Literary magazines are all the more vital for operating off the commercial grid
Eve in Ireland: Controlling and Silencing Irish Women, 1922-1972 by Ailish McFadden
Caricature and the Irish: Satirical Prints from the Library of Trinity College, Dublin c 1780-1830
With insights such as “Hills are not to be confused with holes. The best way to remember it is that the letter ‘i’ in hill goes up, and the letter ‘o’ in hole looks like a hole”, one gets the sense that the synapses in Sundermann’s brain link up in unusual ways. For that, we are the lucky beneficiaries.
If the thought of a shamefully handsome Dubliner in an expensive Aran knit explaining hedges, ditches and open space (“what happens when you just leave things alone”) causes your eyes to roll back in your head, control yourself. The author’s absurdist, tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating humour is terrifically charming.
It can perhaps be described as genuine comic relief to find not one, but two, comedy books that value warmth in their humour. Mad, isn’t it, how freeing it can be to laugh when there’s no one at the butt of the joke?
Brigid O’Dea is a critic
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