Marguerite McDaid's revelations about her broken marriage have been all over the media, but her autobiography is likely to please no one, writes Kathy SheridanDon't bother looking here for anything that reflects badly on theauthor. The relentless victimhood, suffering and self-sacrifice -giving, always giving - is exhausting . . .Sometimes verging on parody:'The most important thing was that my young son went to bed that night,happy an
The book launch on Tuesday was a let-down. Some 400 of Marguerite McDaid's friends were invited and fewer than 20 showed up. No family members attended. There were no speeches and it ended by 11 p.m.
Her choice, shrugged an eye-rolling Donegal acquaintance of the family. Her choice to write the book and launch it in Letterkenny, to challenge her husband in his home place and at the Holiday Inn - directly opposite the business run bythe family of his girlfriend, Siobhan O'Donnell. And to think, he mused, that if the husband, Dr Jim McDaid, organised a function to blow his nose, hundreds would show . . Just as well then that, according to the wife, the book is absolutely not about her husband.
"It is actually about my four years in London," she insisted tartly all week. Ah, so those interminable, narcoleptic chapters about the varying beastliness of landlords, neighbours, employers and letting agents, the dodgy heating systems, the wrong keys . . . That's what had Ireland on Sunday, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Times fighting to pay good money for extracts? Hmmm, would there be a way to settle this, like, say, taking a peek at the cover? Memoirs of a Minister's Wife, it says. Yes, that does it.
Technically, she can claim the title - although the fact that the marriage was all but over by the time he became a minister in 1997 downgrades it a tad. He had already been living away from home for three months when his brief dalliance with Anne Doyle surfaced in April 1998, followed by Marguerite's departure to England. Although he formally requested a legal separation later that year, and she concedes that her marriage effectively ended that year, she affects astonishment when interviewers describe her as separated: "No, no, we're still not separated". And she will never give him a divorce.
She still loves him, she insists, and actually feels sorry for him because: "I know deep down that that's not him . . . addiction clouds everything in addicts' lives". This is not the real Jim; there's an emptiness there, a void, she says, which explains the women, the drink, the horses, the ambition - "he is not a very happy man".
In real life, he is living with his girlfriend, Siobhan O'Donnell, a local woman invariably described in reports as a "blonde barmaid" (she works in her brother's pub), who is either 25 or 30 depending on the reporter's bias.
"She's a very, very nice girl, very down-to-earth. I'd say she's good for Jim," says the Donegal acquaintance. "To tell the truth, Marguerite was seen as stuck-up in the early days. She wouldn't have endeared herself to a lot of people. It was a big thing for us up here, and for Jim, when he became a doctor but it never went to his head."
As for Marguerite, she no longer wears a wedding ring and anyone who asks about her extra-marital love life is smartly told to read the book. This describes an English interlude with Richard, "the man of my dreams", spotted at a railway station and chatted up with alarming determination. Sadly, Richard's wife of six months didn't understand him.
Marguerite explains this affair by saying that she was at "a low ebb". So no one's perfect, right? Mmmm. Don't bother looking here for anything that reflects badly on the author. The relentless victimhood, suffering and self-sacrifice - giving, always giving - is exhausting.
"Why had my husband landed me in this rotten situation?" (Page 69: new life in London; dress not grand enough for Bord Fáilte ball.) Sometimes verging on parody: "The most important thing was that my young son went to bed that night, happy and content. That was all that mattered". (Page 89: another self-sacrificing Christmas.)
Her own take on the book is a mite conflicted. "Have you read the book?" was her snappy rejoinder all week to anyone quibbling about her motivation, the effect on the children ("I had to say to my children, this is my life. I cannot keep doing just what is comfortable for them"), or the spilling of the miserable intimacies of a long marriage that many counsellors would say was ill-starred from the beginning.
The husband remained absent from the Dáil chamber this week and declined to comment (out of concern for the effect on the children, it is believed). Meanwhile, Marguerite was insisting on Liveline that there was "a lot of laughter, a lot of happiness in the book" while also trying to sell it as the "story of living in an addictive situation, with alcoholism". Nowhere in the book does she mention that the man himself claims to have been more or less a teetotaller since 1995.
For all her snappy directives to "read the book", most readers will find it oddly vague for a memoir that purports to be "written with total honesty". Although we get precise dates and times for events such as her husband's promotions and, ad nauseam, Bertie Ahern's flying visit - the high point of which was cups of tea at the kitchen table ("So you see, Bertie is just like the rest of us") - such landmark dates as her wedding or her children's births are omitted.
Apart from his devotion to the use of the bleach, Napisan, and her daring purchase of the tumble dryer (too extravagant in his view), there are no original or leavening insights into daily life chez McDaid. Life with an alcoholic can be despairing and confining, as anyone with a glancing acquaintance with one knows all too well, but Marguerite's was clearly pleasant enough on occasion. The first we hear of her golfing career however, is when she somehow finds room for her clubs in the car-boot heading for England. And then there was the tennis, the music, her lovely garden, the psychotherapy course, the pleasure of helping to design and decorate the new family home in the mid-1990s.
A sense of this conflict, locally, emerged after her interview on Donegal's local Highland radio on Wednesday when callers - balanced for political opportunism - rang in to praise or to blame. The support came for her bravery in speaking out (pour encourager les autres, presumably); the criticism - some of it savage, with a brother-in-law prepared to challenge her claim that her extended family were all on-side against her husband - included accusations of using her husband's alcoholism as an excuse for spilling the dirt and making money, as well as suggestions that her pleas of poverty in the old days were exaggerated. She said her stylish clothes were down to doing clever things with designer buttons on Dunnes Stores best.
Why write the book? asked a patently uncomfortable Pat Kenny on The Late Late Show. "I did it for the money," she replied. Honest answer, nodded the nation, impressed.
But not the right answer, sighed a fellow scorned woman. "The correct answer is, 'because I really wanted to stick it to the vain, drunken, philandering, selfish bastard'. That would have got a smile from a few of us if nothing else. She also says she's doing this to inspire people in similarly desperate situations. God help us, the stuff in the book about her new life in London is such self-pitying tripe that it would frighten the life out of anyone thinking about leaving. She hasn't moved on one iota in the four years."
The trouble with Marguerite McDaid this week is that she pleased no one except, ironically, women who haven't read the book and imagine it to be a robust, practical "how to" guide for brave women who need to move on. She is probably among the last of a generation that married young, had children in quick succession and - encouraged by society - trusted that her husband would always be able and willing to bring home the bacon. (She has now trained to be a counsellor.) For all the pious lip-service to full-time wife- and motherhood, few modern brides are prepared to make that mammoth leap of faith. There is an Irish guide to be written for those who do, and find that faith shattered. This is not it.
Despite her repeated public denunciations of Ireland on Sunday for its treatment of the manuscript, and a threatened injunction on the second extract, the fact is that she gave them a lengthy interview in which she embellished some of the book's information. In the book, the story of the threatened suicide for example merely has the husband saying that "I could do as I wished". The interview - of which she is believed to have seen a transcript before publication - tells us: "He made a flippant remark that there were plenty of pills there in the house if I wanted them".
If - as is believed - she objected to her husband's affair count being its massive headline, she voiced no such objection to Pat Kenny's first question, which also happened to be about the affair count, and reached a far larger audience.
Her publisher, John O'Connor of Blackwater Press, says carefully, that the "five-figure deal" negotiated between him and the paper was in relation to extracts and "had nothing to do with the additional arrangement she got with the newspaper for a weekend in Paris".
In any event, the money, at least, is materialising. Her reward from Ireland on Sunday labours was a fee understood to be around €15,000 (compared to an Irish norm of €2,000 for something similar) and the Paris weekend.
If a publisher's job is to publicise, then Blackwater has done her proud. She has not been off the airwaves or out of the papers for weeks. According to trade sources, however, she will need to sell a massive 30,000 copies to make royalties of €45,000 - "but you're not talking Roy Keane here. I'd be amazed to see it selling that many".
So, at best, a yield of €60,000 in total. Was it worth it? That's the question.
No Other Medicine, but Hope by Marguerite McDaid is published by Blackwater (€12.99)