Memoir: When Sheila Sullivan and her then-husband and fellow journalist Bob Lane moved to Ireland from New York in 1986, it was, as she notes, neither fashionable nor profitable.
Thirty thousand people were leaving the country each year. There were postal disputes, disruptions in electricity supplies and bus strikes. Jimmy Breslin, who'd been something of a mentor to Sullivan during her early days in journalism, muttered darkly about the couple sitting in the rain with their one-way ticket stubs.
But Sullivan had fallen in love with the country in the late 1970s when she'd come to study for a year on a postgraduate fellowship. She returned to Manhattan in 1979 and spent the next seven years working for the New York Daily News and CNN (in its infancy, referred to by other hacks as "Chicken Noodle News").
But she came back. The plan, upon escaping to Spiddal, was that she and Lane would work for Ireland Digest. When the publication vanished without a trace, Lane got a job at the GPO as advertising and public relations manager of the National Lottery.
The couple moved to Ranelagh, living as guests with Tom MacIntyre, whom Sullivan had met while MacIntyre was teaching at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Though MacIntyre's creative writing class had been full, he'd allowed her to audit, saying "I'd like to keep you around for entertainment value".
She continued to work in the news business, landing at The Irish Times as a sub-editor in 1987. Back then, manual typewriters were the rule, phone lines hung from the ceiling, and "news didn't break . . . except in the North; it seeped out". Breslin, a consistent presence in her life over the years, would call her to discuss the divorce referendum or the Northern peace process.
Eventually, after she and Lane divorced in 1997, Sullivan bought a cottage on Achill - "Inishbofin for beginners" - and moved there with their son. Having long had a love of Irish islands, she wanted her son to experience a sense of place impossible in the suburbs of a by-then booming Dublin. Soon, the man who would become her second husband, New Zealand composer Brent Parker, joined them.
Sullivan wrote this, a memoir of her life, partly because, as she says towards the end of Follow the Moon, after 25 years in the news business she wanted to "step back from the unending flow of breaking stories, to try to analyse events from a different perspective". But it is not the events alone that make a memoir (unless they are so singular that they allow us to glimpse a life utterly foreign to our own) but the relating of them. Indeed, even an externally uneventful life can become a thing of fascination if well told. Yet Sullivan's style is too bland, her observations too restrained, to bring the story of her life to life.
There are a few interesting digressions: the description of Breslin and his working methods, chatting with Dominick Dunne while covering the retrial of Claus von Bulow, Heinrich Böll's time in Achill, and the meeting with John Moriarty, who helped her "reclaim American inheritance in both its positive and negative aspects" and who delivers quick lectures on both Moby Dick and how the vehicular gridlock in which Dubliners daily find themselves is symbolic of a deeper emotional and intellectual gridlock.
But there are far too many uninteresting descriptions - of reflexology, teachers who inspired her, piano lessons and Gaelic football matches ("Nothing could have prepared me for the excitement, the community support, the almost life-and-death intensity of Gaelic football matches among primary school children in the west of Ireland").
And there are missed opportunities. Surely a meeting in a bar when she was shadowing Breslin in the 1970s with Breslin, Pete Hamill and Bernadette Devlin merits more than the scant 10 lines she gives it. Surely Dublin on a Saturday night could be described more colourfully than as a place of "public order offences and raucous behaviour". That Sullivan once spent "an entire Thanksgiving break at home in my old bedroom . . . reading On the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel Kant, underlining important passages with a yellow marker", or that her "father's favourite pastime was listening to classical music" is likely to be of little interest to anyone not close to her.
The events of the life are here - the characters encountered, the newsrooms laboured in, the changes that have taken place in Ireland since 1986 - but, sadly, the telling of them is too often lacking.
Molly McCloskey's latest book is the novel, Protection, published by Penguin Ireland. She is currently working for the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia, based in Nairobi
Follow the Moon By Sheila Sullivan Currach Press, 190pp. €14.99