The Reading List: Eight Compelling Irish Essay Collections to Ease You into Winter Recess
By Paula Dennan, Deputy News Editor
Between exam season and end-of-semester deadlines, you’d be forgiven for never wanting to hear the word ‘essay’ again. But I am here to convince you to dedicate some of your winter recess to picking up at least one essay collection by an Irish author. We are talking about literary, personal, humorous, political, and cultural criticism essays, not academic ones (although academics have written some of the books on this list).
What each collection has in common is that by writing about their own experiences, the authors invite their readers to examine the broader society and draw connections that they may not have considered before.
OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea by Patrick Freyne (Penguin, 2021)
People familiar with Patrick Freyne’s Irish Times features and columns will be pleased to know that OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea features the humour, wit, and warmth readers have come to expect from Freyne’s work. Freyne shares stories about touring with his band, working as a carer, being a dishwasher on the set of Braveheart, and what it's like to be a journalist. He also writes frankly about family, grief, mental health, and being childless due to circumstances rather than choice.
Freyne’s essays are laugh-out-loud funny. I’m an elder millennial, so I mean LOL in the literal sense. Not that I slightly chuckled, but I’m using crying laughing emojis on the internet. They are also poignant and thought-provoking.
Read online: An edited extract from the essay The Story of My Brother's Birth, Starring Me (RTÉ Culture).
Constellations: Reflections from Life by Sinéad Gleeson (Picador, 2019)
I read Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations shortly after it was published in 2019, and five years on, I still regularly think about some of its essays. Gleeson expertly blends the personal, the political, and the cultural in a collection that, as the subtitle suggests, gives voice to reflections on illness, chronic pain, motherhood, bodies, and autonomy.
The stories in Constellations, featuring a school trip to Lourdes, poetry inspired by the McGill pain index, and a possible ghost sighting, are personal. Still, Gleeson uncovers the interlinked issues faced by many women moving through the world in a cisgender female body.
Read online: Blue Hills and Chalk Bones (Granta), Second Mother (Granta), and Hair (Banshee).
The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet by Róisín Kiberd (Serpent’s Tail, 2021)
If you have ever questioned your relationship with social media and the internet, you’ll enjoy The Disconnect by Róisín Kiberd. Let’s be honest: who hasn’t dreamed of logging off forever? Part-memoir and part-cultural criticism, Róisín Kiberd is clear-eyed in her analysis of the impact of our increasing reliance on technology — individually, collectively, and societally.
Charting the rise of the internet as we know it by way of 24-hour gyms, the increase in social media, the gentrification of Dublin via the Silicon Docks, Kiberd’s work in social media and tech journalism, insomnia and mental health issues, and energy drinks, The Disconnect offers an assessment of modern life that unsettling, yet completely recognisable.
Given the speed at which technology changes, I worried that re-reading The Disconnect would already feel dated. It doesn’t, which is a testament to Kiberd’s skill.
Read online: An edited extract from the essay A History Of The World Since 1989 (RTÉ Culture) and Roisin Kiberd on how Facebook helped change the internet - and our lives (The Journal).
Negative Space by Cristín Leach (Merrion Press, 2022)
When I first read Negative Space, I described it to anyone who would listen as a masterclass in navigating the personal and the private in writing about the self. Two years on, a masterclass is still how I describe art critic Cristín Leach’s memoir-in-essays. Throughout the breakdown of her marriage, Leach considers what it means to build, dismantle, and rebuild a life.
Negative Space is a non-linear memoir. The essays focus on the central themes of writing, seeing, listening, sounding, sinking, breaking, healing, and home rather than a chronological retelling of the facts. This approach allows Leach to converse with the art and writing that has helped shape her career.
Read online: An edited extract from the essay Healing (RTÉ Culture).
Minor Monuments by Ian Maleney (Tramp Press, 2019)
Published in 2019 and released in paperback in 2023, Minor Monuments is the debut book from Ian Maleney, UCC’s Writer-in-Residence 2024. Life on the family farm in Offaly takes centre stage in these essays. As does Maleney’s relationship with his grandfather, John Joe, who was living with Alzheimer's disease for much of the period covered, although Minor Monuments was published after his grandfather’s death.
Maleney explores the rural landscape, recording the sounds he encounters. He also shares the impact of John Joe’s illness on the family and weaves in reflections on music, art, and literature. Minor Monuments is a devastatingly beautiful essay collection about memory, connection, sound, home, and belonging.
Read online: An edited extract from the essay And The Wind It Tremendously Blew (RTÉ Culture).
Unsettled by Rosaleen McDonagh (Skein Press, 2021)
Rosaleen McDonagh is a playwright, writer, performer, and Traveller woman with a disability. Unsettled is written from an intersectional feminist perspective because McDonagh’s experience as a member of the Traveller community, a woman, and a person with a disability are intertwined. From the outset, McDonagh makes clear that the essays in this collection are not ‘by an inspirational person.’ They embody ‘a diverse experience of what it is to be Irish.’
McDonagh’s experience of racism, sexism, ableism, abuse, and dehumanisation confronts the reader with aspects of Irish society that we can no longer deny, even if we would rather tell ourselves that Ireland is a wholly progressive country.
Listen online: A Drama on One performance of the essay I Am Not Your ‘Knacker’ (RTÉ Radio 1).
Notes to Self by Emilie Pine (Penguin, 2019)
Originally published in Ireland by Tramp Press, Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self was later published worldwide by Penguin. With essays about her miscarriage and infertility, her father’s alcoholism, her parent's separation at a time when divorce was illegal, dealing and not dealing with mental health issues, sexual violence, female pain, and misogyny in the workplace, Notes to Self is a deeply personal collection. Yet, there is a universality to the themes covered. Pine, a Professor of Modern Drama at UCD, writes with a combination of frankness and nuance that, on the surface, appears contradictory but lends itself to the complexity of the experiences discussed.
A word of caution about reading Notes to Self in public because I sobbed into my cup while sitting in a coffee shop. Anne Enright warned people not to read it public for this reason in the original blurb, and I didn’t listen. Do not make the same mistake.
Read online: Living with my father: ‘It is hard to love an addict’ (The Irish Times).
Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Shows by Sophie White (Tramp Press, 2021)
Sophie White is an author, columnist, and podcaster whose fiction regularly leaves me exclaiming, ‘How the hell did she come up with that?’ I mean this in a good way: White writes storylines that would seem too far-fetched and over the top in someone else’s hands, but she makes them utterly compelling. Her fifth book, Corpsing, is an unflinching examination of grief, mental illness, addiction, motherhood, and creativity. In writing about her father’s early-onset dementia, White discusses the anticipatory grief that comes with watching a loved one slowly lose themselves to a disease that you know will play a part in their death. It’s a grief many readers will be familiar with, even if their circumstances differ from the specifics White depicts. Many of the essays are shot through with dark humour that will have you laughing when you least expect it.
Yes, this is another Tramp Press published collection. What can I say? They publish excellent books!
Read online: 'This illness is a thief and a liar. It ransacks my happy memories' (The Journal)
