A six-year-old boy stands on a stool and tells a story.
This single image provides the conceptual starting point for Related Lives – an ambitious collection of stories and essays based on a patchwork of family memories woven together by the author’s imagination.
“I attempt to grab onto this image of me telling a story,” writes Duggan, “creating a make-believe to hold an audience, a child mixing details of his daily life with imaginings, to steady myself on that stool once more.”
The stories that spill forth from this vantage point are those of the Duggan family, of the author’s father Eddie Duggan and mother Margaret Spillane, and their “home place” of Waterford.
These are people, the author proudly tells us, who “cannot be Googled”, and so the lives of “Mam” and “Dad”, “Nanny Spillane”, “Uncle Tony” and “Auntie Maura” must be “mined from remembering and forged from imagining”.
Hence an unexpected visit to Auntie Maura’s – and the man he spots lying under a coat on her sofa – becomes part of his aunt’s fictional reminiscences from a hospital bed. His mother’s anecdote about a young man digging a trench in the road outside Paddington General prompts a story which imagines his mother’s life in London before he was born.
Particularly memorable is the casual revelation, on a visit to an elderly great-uncle, that “your grandfather had a bullet taken out of his leg on this table”. This becomes Guns in the Rowan Tree, a story in which Duggan imagines his grandfather as a gunman caught up in an ambush during the War of Independence.
Best known as a playwright and as the author of the Oscar-nominated short film, Dance Lexie Dance, Duggan readily admits to a love of words and language, and this talent allows him to recreate the characters in his family tree in a manner as unique and as authentic as each individual.
Uncle Jack, a sand man in Waterford Iron Founders, is described in the terminology of his trade – a “cast iron man” with “pitch black hair” and “glowing cheeks” from the heat of the furnace. The story of Nanny Spillane, a Cork woman displaced to Waterford, is infused with the “rolling, lilting rhythm” of west Cork voices and overlaid with the bells of the Angelus.
Incredibly, this collection was initially envisaged as a private project, written for the five sisters to whom it is dedicated and intended for distribution only within the family.
Despite that, the strength of these stories lies in their universality.
Most of us will be able to identify with Uncle Tony or Auntie Kathleen – as well as the rest of the parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who make up the cast list – and we have all, at some time or another, wished that we knew more about our relatives’ past.
Duggan is no exception. “I have a note among my papers which reads ‘Fictionalise the family. Talk to Mam’,” he writes, yet with the main protagonists now deceased, he can only regret that he never did so.
“If only I could get them all in a room for an hour. Just tea. No drink, until after. After they had told me the story of their lives. There is no such hour. Just the eternity they have gone to, some memories and these imaginings from the boy on the stool.”
The often hazy distinction between recollection and imagination, and the uncertainties to which this gives rise, clearly fascinates Duggan. He describes Related Lives as an “imagined memoir”, and admits that “in many instances I do not know the full incident,” and so he must use his writer’s craft to recreate his family.
In this, he takes the character of Michael in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa as his inspiration. “Michael … says that memory fascinates him, because it is both real and illusory. He relies more on the atmosphere than on the occurrences of reality and illusion. Let that offer the framework for this book.”
Despite that, doubt – that inevitable companion of memory – remains. A memory of Duggan’s father falling into his arms in the bar of a hotel in Dunmanway is immediately questioned. “I wonder if he was ever so demonstrative?”
Indeed, Duggan wonders whether “one of the flaws in writing these stories is that, as I attempt to conjure up my relatives, I only succeed in conjuring up myself.”
Such is the nature of memory and, one might argue, fiction itself. Every story, whether factual or imagined, ultimately reveals as much about its author as it does about its characters.
At times this is not without humour. Duggan readily admits that “one of my biggest regrets is that I did not play more hurling when I was younger. Could I have made the Waterford senior team?”
Yet his dreams of playing for his county stem, in part, from family tradition and from his relatives’ love of hurling.
Inevitably “the story of the son is part of the story of the parents”, and Duggan acknowledges the connections – of blood, of heritage, of the “home place” – that bind the generations together.
Hence he wonders whether his work in film stems from the generosity of his grandmother, who used to slip him money to go to the Saturday matinee, and notes that “my son, Eddie’s grandson, works in labour politics in London and Europe. My father would take pride in him.”
It is clear that Duggan is equally proud of his relatives and of the familial legacy he has inherited, and this collection is as much a tribute to them as it is a memoir.
Above all, he acknowledges the debt he owes his parents.
“I stood on Table Mountain and thought of them. I stood on Mount Kinabalu and thought of them … Buried in the ground in the southeast of Ireland, never one having scaled such mountains. Yet, somehow, they put me there.”
One of the key writings in the collection is a secular prayer, written in a Polish basilica for the author’s mother.
“Ma./ I kneel before you always./ You are my faith.”
Family, and the shared memories to which it gives rise, is the sacrament of this more secular age, and despite Duggan’s avowal that “my relatives are not great”, their lives deserve attention for precisely that reason.
Mam, Dad, Uncle Tony, Auntie Maura and the rest of the Duggan and Spillane families have passed on to their descendants not just their own stories or memories, but what is effectively a social history of Ireland in a turbulent 20th century.
The War of Independence, the labour movement, the decline of heavy industry, ongoing emigration and the life of the Irish in London are part of many people’s history, and it is entirely appropriate that in this year of centenaries – which has prompted so many to re-examine their heritage – that remarkably unremarkable family should be thus celebrated.
His parents would have been proud.
Freya McClements is a writer and arts journalist
