Anyone who knows me will appreciate the delicious irony of the theme I chose for my new book, which is the 20-year reunion of a Leaving Cert class. Since I left college, somewhere towards the end of the Dark Ages, I have received regular invitations to various reunions, all of which have ended up in my recycling bin, and I have similarly resisted all attempts to get me to reconnect with school friends from further back.
It’s not that I have anything against reunions per se: on the contrary, I can see that they have a lot to recommend them. Revisiting the past, meeting up again with friends who once featured so prominently in your own story, discovering what paths they’ve taken, how their lives have panned out, must surely make for interesting conversations – and, of course, as a writer I’m well aware how daft it is to be rejecting occasions that would surely provide fodder for half a dozen novels, but I just can’t do it.
My dilemma is my truly abysmal memory. At the end of any given day I can scarcely recall what I had for breakfast, or what the weather was like when I pulled apart my bedroom curtains a mere handful of hours before. Now imagine me walking into a roomful of people I hadn’t seen for some considerable time; imagine the embarrassment of having to ask the name of everyone I met, the anxiety of trying frantically to recall the tiniest detail of our previous relationships, the stress involved in the whole sorry scenario.
And here’s the thing: you can bet they’d all remember me. I’m not sure that it’s a good or a bad thing that anyone I bump into from my younger days, even my far younger days, has no trouble identifying me. “Hi Roisin!” they’ll call out cheerily, but invariably I draw a blank with them, and have to bluff along as best I can, hoping to God I’ll get through the conversation without having to admit that his or her name has escaped me. I rarely manage this, but most of the time they go away unaware that I’d also forgotten every other detail of their identities. You can see why I run a mile from reunions.
My mother is the complete opposite. Even at 87 her memory is as reliable as daybreak; she remembers people from her childhood as clearly as those she met yesterday. A few years ago she attended her 50-year college reunion, and came home on a high from meeting women she’d last encountered when colour television was still a twinkle in RTEÉ’s eye, and Neil Armstrong was looking thoughtfully at the moon – and you can bet your life she wasn’t stuck for a name all night.
So why, given my reunion phobia, did I choose it as the theme for a novel? That came about, in fact, as a result of a conversation I had last year at the only reunion I can remember attending (but given the shocking condition of my memory, I may well have been to many more). The occasion was the 25th year in existence of the Limerick School Project, the school in which I’d spent the final 11 years of my teaching career.
Everyone who’d had any association with the school over the years was invited to return and celebrate its silver anniversary, and since I still lived in Limerick and often encountered my former colleagues (whom I generally managed to remember, miraculously) I figured my name would be mud if I didn’t put in an appearance. On the appointed day, therefore, I dusted down the glad rags and headed for the school, bracing myself every step of the way for the mortification that surely awaited me.
Astonishingly, the evening was nowhere near as fraught as I’d anticipated. I actually managed to remember more names than I forgot, so only about half my time was spent apologising. Among the assembled were scores of past pupils whom I felt fine about not recognising, given that the now teenagers had been youngsters of four or five when I’d last had any dealings with them – and by and large the parents of these youths had for some reason attached themselves to what fragments of my crumbling memory they could find, so I survived the night with much of my dignity intact.
At one stage I was in conversation with a mother of one of my old students, and she remarked that a reunion would make a good theme for a novel – and after tossing the notion around in my head for a minute I had to agree. Lots of scope for character development, a nice natural split in the narrative between then and now, plenty of room for plot twists as I guided the story from past to present. And that night, even though I was still working on a previous book, the decision was made to go the reunion route with the next.
And you know what? For the eight months or so I spent on the first draft, I found my attitude towards reunions in general beginning to soften. As the word count rose and the narrative unfolded, I felt myself becoming more open to the idea of meeting up with people from my past.
So what if I had to admit to memory lapses? Wouldn’t the bit of embarrassment be worth it to find out what had become of that girl from secondary school, the one with the red hair who came top in every subject but who hadn’t a single friend in the class? And wouldn’t it be interesting to see who’d emigrated, who’d never married (hello), who’d achieved success or suffered heartbreak along the way – or indeed, to hear who hadn’t made it this far?
So the next time I get a reunion invite, I’m thinking of saying yes instead of no. Must remember to bring my notebook with me – no way will I remember all the stories the next day.
The Reunion is published by Hachette Books Ireland, £13.99
