We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It: A Memoir of My Irish Boyhood

Novelist Phelan (In the Season of the Daisies) stitches together a series of tender and earnest anecdotes of coming-of-age in the rural Irish midlands of the 1940s. Growing up on a farm, Phelan raised pigs, helped his father with the horses (“while Dad cleaned the stable and scattered soft barley straw, the children walked the horses around the farmyard”), and drove cattle to a nearby livestock fair, where he learned the art of negotiating (when one buyer made “a meaningless offer, Dad wouldn’t even look at the man”). In elementary school, Phelan learned “to perform my first religious rite—the sign of the cross.” Phelan had expressed interest in becoming a priest, and before he headed off to college his neighbor warned him that if he became a priest “he’ll be sorry in the long run.” Nevertheless, Phelan was ordained to the priesthood in 1965, but left it 11 years later. Phelan’s father provides the heartbeat of the memoir: he’s a taciturn, no-nonsense man who loved and respected his family, worked hard, (“Every day, Dad organized the cleaning up after dinner, with himself doing the washing”). Phelan’s vivid images of life on the farm and at school provide a rich and colorful snapshot of the times that shaped him. (Mar.)