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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/29\/magazine\/sebastian-barry-family-ireland-secret.html?emc=edit_nn_20260930&nl=the-morning&segment_id=227287",
    "parsed_content": "Credit...Gareth McConnell for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexSearch & Section NavigationSection NavigationAccountAccountGoHome U.S.SECTIONSU.S.PoliticsNew YorkCaliforniaEducationHealthObituariesScienceClimateWeatherSportsBusinessTechThe UpshotThe MagazineTOP STORIESDonald TrumpSupreme CourtCongressImmigrationAbortionLatest PollsNEWSLETTERSThe MorningMake sense of the day\u2019s news and ideas.The EveningCatch up on big news, and wind down to end your day.See all newslettersPODCASTSThe DailyThe biggest stories of our time, in 20 minutes a day.See all podcastsWorldSECTIONSWorldAfricaAmericasAsiaAustraliaCanadaEuropeMiddle EastScienceClimateWeatherHealthObituariesTOP STORIESMiddle East CrisisRussia-Ukraine WarChina International RelationsThe Global ProfileLeer en Espa\u00f1olNEWSLETTERSThe WorldA guide to understanding the news, made for readers around the globe.Your Places: Global UpdateThe latest news for any part of the world you select.Canada LetterBackstories and analysis from our Canadian correspondents.See all newslettersBusinessSECTIONSBusinessTechEconomyMediaFinance and MarketsDealBookPersonal TechEnergy TransitionYour MoneyTOP STORIESU.S. EconomyStock MarketArtificial IntelligenceNEWSLETTERSDealBookThe most crucial business and policy news you need to know.On TechOur best tech reporting from the week.See all newslettersPODCASTSHard ForkOur tech journalists help you make sense of the rapidly changing tech world.See all podcastsArtsSECTIONSToday's ArtsBook ReviewBest SellersDanceMoviesMusicTelevisionTheaterPop CultureT MagazineVisual ArtsRECOMMENDATIONS100 Best Movies of the 21st CenturyCritic\u2019s PicksWhat to ReadWhat to WatchWhat to Listen To5 Minutes to Make You Love MusicNEWSLETTERSBooksReviews, news and features to help you find your next read.WatchingStreaming TV and movie recommendations.See all newslettersPODCASTSBook ReviewThe podcast that takes you inside the literary world.PopcastPop music news, new songs and albums, and artists of note.See all podcastsLifestyleSECTIONSAll LifestyleWellTravelStyleReal EstateFoodLoveYour MoneyPersonal TechT MagazineCOLUMNS36 HoursAsk WellThe HuntModern LoveWhere to EatVowsSocial Q\u2019sThe EthicistAsk the TherapistNEWSLETTERSThe WeekenderUnwind with stories about culture and the way we live.WellEssential news and guidance to live your healthiest life.See all newslettersPODCASTSModern LoveThe complicated love lives of real people.See all podcastsOpinionSECTIONSOpinionGuest EssaysEditorialsOp-DocsVideosLettersTOPICSPoliticsWorldBusinessTechClimateHealthCultureCOLUMNISTSJamelle BouieMaureen DowdDavid FrenchThomas L. 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Win ProjectionsNEWSLETTERSThe PulseDelivering the top stories in sports, Sunday to Friday.See all newslettersPLAYConnections: Sports Edition Connections: Soccer Edition Connections Coach U.S.InternationalCanadaEspa\u00f1ol\u4e2d\u6587Behind His Great Novels, an Unbearable Family SecretThe Irish author Sebastian Barry has made a career of mining his family history. But he kept one story buried.Credit...Gareth McConnell for The New York TimesSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen \u00b7 44:48 min Share full articleBy Giles HarveyGiles Harvey began corresponding with Sebastian Barry almost three years ago and spent several days talking with him at his home in Ireland this spring.Sept. 29, 2026In late May 2021, toward the end of Ireland\u2019s third Covid lockdown, the novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry, often mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate, gave an unusual public lecture from his dining room in Wicklow. The occasion was a Dublin literary festival, or its online incarnation, and hundreds had signed up to hear Barry speak. His subject that day, as it often tends to be, was family \u2014 both his own troubled clan and the wider human fold. \u201cThe good news is, we are all the same family,\u201d as one of his characters says about the discovery of DNA. \u201cThe bad news is, we are all the same family.\u201dAt 65, Barry had spent the past four decades furiously shaking his crooked family tree. The fruit of this effort was an extraordinary sequence of novels and plays inspired by Barry\u2019s real-life ancestors. Collectively \u2014 which is how he intends them to be read \u2014 they amount to a kind of Irish \u201cWar and Peace,\u201d in which the country\u2019s violent 20th century upends the lives of two ill-fated households, the Dunnes and the McNultys. Now, as Barry loomed behind a music stand with a gooseneck lamp clipped to one side and a microphone protruding from the other, it seemed that he was going to speak plainly about the flesh-and-blood people he\u2019d transfigured into fiction \u2014 as well as his more immediate kin.Announcing his title, \u201cThe Fog of Family,\u201d Barry began to describe the time his older sister shattered his nose by pushing him down the steps of their house in the Dublin suburb of Monkstown. He was 1\u00bd. \u201cThen it duly healed and then she pushed me out a window,\u201d Barry went on, the light flashing off his rectangular spectacles and imparting a sheen to his tousled gray hair. \u201cBut it was the ground floor and it merely served to break my nose again.\u201dHis sister, Barry was keen to emphasize, was \u201cnot a murderer, she was a child consumed by a powerful emotion.\u201d Until recently, she\u2019d been the only child. \u201cThen, the interloper arrived.\u201d Another early memory, he continued, as though he\u2019d just discerned it through the haze, \u201cwas me smearing the contents of my nappy on the wall behind my cot, to the distress of my sister, who shared the room \u2014 maybe she had a motive for murder after all \u2014 but which my mother interpreted as an early sign of artistic ability.\u201d When he was only 2 weeks old, she put a pencil in his hand, enjoining him to write or draw.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIf she had known the havoc he would wreak with it, it\u2019s possible that his mother, Joan O\u2019Hara, a celebrated actress, would have hesitated to arm him. As the nappy-smearing episode seems slyly to signal, Barry would become, at least in the eyes of some of his detractors, a befouler of Irishness. At the time of the lecture, Barry was in his final year as the Laureate for Irish Fiction, heralded both at home and overseas, but for much of his career he had courted outrage by humanizing the villains of the Irish national story, from the country\u2019s Protestant minority to former servants of the British crown.Among the outraged were members of his own family. The cursed marriage of his maternal grandparents served as the basis for an early novella, \u201cTime Out of Mind\u201d (1983). \u201cYou fucker,\u201d his grandfather, a widowed veteran of the British Army, exclaimed after reading it, having summoned Barry to his Dublin flat. \u201cTo hear that out of my grandfather\u2019s mouth was shocking,\u201d Barry once said of the fraught conversation, the last they ever had. \u201cHe kept asking me how I knew all these things.\u201dThe answer turned up in Barry\u2019s lecture. \u201cHe told me everything about his life except the (myriad) bad things,\u201d Barry informed his digital audience, which \u201cwould have worked even better if my mother had not specialized, usually in another part of the flat, in telling me all his secrets anyway.\u201d These secrets included runaway alcoholism and gambling debts that drained his wife\u2019s inheritance. He also used to beat Joan\u2019s sister in the days of their childhood, a reason she may have wanted to expose him, if only to her son. Whatever the case, her example clearly stuck. Barry has been telling secrets ever since.His father\u2019s secrets proved harder to elicit. Francis Barry, who went by Frank, was a charismatic architect and also wrote poetry and fiction on the side. \u201cHe was a man with many hidden things all his life,\u201d Barry said in the lecture, \u201cincluding his chin.\u201d He was referring to his father\u2019s \u201crich red beard,\u201d which, as a boy, he would reach out longingly to touch. \u201cHe was cloaked in a raiment of gold,\u201d Barry has said of Frank, or of his worshipful child\u2019s-eye view of him, even if he could be remote and inaccessible. \u201cI missed his company even as I enjoyed it,\u201d Barry remarked in the lecture, groping the air with his large, restless hands. This made his following words all the more striking: \u201cBy the time I was in my early 30s, various family troubles had separated us permanently.\u201d The declaration seemed to set the table for a feast of disclosure.ImageSebastian Barry in the garden of his childhood home in Monkstown in 1982.Credit...Sebastian Barry Papers\/Harry Ransom Center\/The University of Texas at AustinYet Barry didn\u2019t sit down to it. Instead of divulging the source of these \u201ctroubles,\u201d he moved on to other recollections of other family members. When he returned to his parents later, his tone remained cryptic: \u201cI didn\u2019t know them, I mistook them, and they didn\u2019t know themselves, to a tragic degree, and if they did, hid what they knew, from us, and just as tragically from themselves. Their narratives were menaced by a foggy disarray.\u201d But so was Barry\u2019s lecture, which never explained what it was his parents knew or why their evasion came at such cost.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen Frank died the following January, at the age of 91, it seemed as if Barry might finally unburden himself. In an interview at a literary festival later that year, he said that his next novel was going to center on his parents\u2019 marriage. The book would be the 10th and last in the series about his complicated forebears, which stretches from the mid-19th century to the turn of the millennium. This was how he\u2019d always imagined the sequence would conclude, and now that both his parents were gone, his mother having died in 2007, the way ahead seemed clear. \u201cI felt, just in the grace of time and in his mysterious way, he might have given me a sort of gentle permission,\u201d Barry said of his father. \u201cNot that I had seen him for 10 years,\u201d he clarified. \u201cI\u2019m just reading that into it.\u201dAfter stumbling across the interview online, I wrote to Barry to suggest the new book might serve as the occasion for a career-spanning profile. He replied enthusiastically, promising to keep me abreast of his progress. It was then mid-January 2024. His aim was to finish by the following spring. \u201cBut the gods,\u201d he added, \u201cwill have something to say about this, I am sure.\u201dBarry and I corresponded for the next year and a half, during which the novel appeared to be on course. Then, in July of last year, he sent me a surprising email. Something had happened in the time since his father died, Barry explained. \u201cWhere there was once a great need to proclaim aloud,\u201d he wrote \u2014 neglecting to specify just what it was he\u2019d felt the need to proclaim \u2014 Barry now found himself in a different state of mind. \u201cA matter I thought so urgent and in need of saying\u201d had come to seem better served by a \u201cstrange new beneficent silence.\u201dInstead of tackling his parents\u2019 marriage, he was writing what seemed \u2014 on its face, at least \u2014 a very different kind of book. \u201cThe Newer World,\u201d which came out last week, tells the story of Tennyson Bouguereau, a Black freedman making his way in the post-bellum South. Bouguereau appeared in two earlier novels. The first of these, \u201cDays Without End,\u201d which won a 2016 Costa prize, is narrated, in a wonderfully crooked English, by Thomas McNulty, a figure based on one of Barry\u2019s ancestors who fled Ireland for America during the Great Famine (1845-52) and ended up fighting in the so-called Indian Wars. McNulty, a victim of colonial violence, has mixed feelings about inflicting violence on another native group. \u201cWhen that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland, he said he would leave nothing alive,\u201d McNulty muses on the English conquest of the mid-17th century. \u201cSaid the Irish were vermin and devils. Clean out the country for good people to step into. Make a paradise. Now we make this American paradise, I guess.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn a strange way, however, McNulty really does make an American paradise amid all this horror. Early in his time as an innocent abroad, he falls in love with another down-and-outer, a New England youth named John Cole. Together they find employment dressing up as girls to titillate the patrons of a mining-town saloon before joining the army for want of other work. When their service is completed, they settle on a farm in Paris, Tenn., with a group of other social undesirables. Among them are a Lakota girl, Winona, the adopted child of McNulty and Cole; as well as Bouguereau, a tireless farmhand; and his sister Rosalee, the household cook. In paraphrase, it may sound like a salad of diversity tropes, but Barry\u2019s extraordinary prose \u2014 demotic yet precise, lyrically compacted yet anti-sentimental \u2014 provides the crucial binding agent.The characters in Barry\u2019s Irish books are often cast out by their families of origin. In his American books, those outcasts form families of choice, which offer them refuge from the storm of history. That refuge, though, is hardly impregnable. Early in \u201cThe Newer World,\u201d shortly after the Civil War breaks out, a group of Confederate troops drops by the farm, having heard that its owner has joined the Union Army. After the men seize the farm\u2019s horses, one of them, a local dignitary named Tim Petrie, asks if Rosalee has been \u201cbred.\u201d (\u201cThe young butternut laughed like he\u2019d said the best thing since the Bible,\u201d Bouguereau tells us.) A nightmare scene unfolds, as Petrie hauls Rosalee into a nearby shed and, as the others listen on, rapes her. \u201cNo one can measure the shame of it,\u201d Bouguereau says. \u201cRosalee screaming and then not screaming. The Petrie boy coming out of the dark door and fastening his belt like he had just pissed.\u201dFor all their gore and mayhem, it can sometimes seem as though writing his American novels offers Barry a respite from writing his Irish ones. \u201cIt took a little bit of self-possession to communicate to you \u2014 to confess to you \u2014 that I had written another book,\u201d Barry told me one mid-May afternoon.That morning he\u2019d met me at Dublin Airport in his Land Rover Discovery, since, as he put it in an email, \u201ctransportation is in its infancy in Wicklow and will remain ever so.\u201d We were now en route to the converted rectory where Barry has lived for the past 30 years.\u201cI did feel a responsibility toward you,\u201d he went on, as we wound our way up a narrow lane whose verges were frothing with Queen Anne\u2019s Lace. Barry, a rangy man with a graying goatee who can sometimes lose track of mundane goings-on, had just taken a wrong turn.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cI\u2019ve never been up here in my life,\u201d he said, squinting through the windshield.\u201cI hope I didn\u2019t throw you off,\u201d I replied.\u201cNo, not at all,\u201d he answered rather breezily.\u201cI mean with the book, not the driving,\u201d I clarified.\u201cOh, no,\u201d he said, cottoning on. \u201cNo, no.\u201dTo hear Barry tell it, the decision was entirely out of his hands. He speaks of his characters dictating their stories, and himself as merely an inundated scribe. \u201cIt would probably shock you, the degree to which I believe that these are living-present persons, that Tennyson Bouguereau has been in my work room with me for a year and a half,\u201d he said.On our way to Wicklow, he told me he remained unsure if he would eventually return to the novel about his parents. One of his closest friends, the Irish historian Roy Foster, once urged him to steer clear of the subject. \u201cIt\u2019s the creative wound from which so much has come,\u201d Foster said to me. \u201cAnd I think to cauterize it in a novel might stop the process.\u201d Barry, for his part, was \u201cthrilled\u201d that Bouguereau had taken his attention. \u201cIt meant I could postpone that discussion with my soul.\u201dDuring my time with Barry, I seemed to overhear that dialogue of self and soul. One moment, he appeared to be on the cusp of revelation; the next, he would retreat, change the subject, crack a joke. \u201cThe modern habit is to tell everything, isn\u2019t it,\u201d he said one day over lunch in an unrelaxed tone. \u201cLet\u2019s start a new fashion of people not communicating their central despair!\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTAs a child, Barry was incorrigibly \u201cpass-remarkable,\u201d as the Irish idiom has it. \u201cIf a lady went by who had a mustache, I would just say so out loud,\u201d he admitted. \u201cWriting novels is like pass-remarkability on an enormous scale. It\u2019s just saying the thing. And it\u2019s been so bred into us as Irish people never to say anything that to say something is very thrilling.\u201d Except there were clearly things he wasn\u2019t saying about his own past.ImageBarry as a baby with his mother, Joan O\u2019Hara, who was one of Ireland\u2019s most celebrated actresses, in 1956.Credit...Sebastian Barry Papers\/Harry Ransom Center\/The University of Texas at AustinBarry had a confusing childhood; the fog, it seems, was there from the start. For a long time, he assumed all mothers were like his, disappearing in the morning and returning late at night. When he was 8, he went to see her perform for the first time. The play was \u201cCathleen ni Houlihan\u201d (1902), a nationalistic allegory by Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. As the lights went down, Barry grew perplexed. Normally when you went into a room, you turned the lights on. His bafflement increased when his mother appeared onstage, transformed into a frail old woman \u2014 the title figure, a personification of Ireland. Barry, horrified, assumed the change was permanent.\u201cWe\u2019d come in on the bus from Monkstown, and my first thought was: How are we going to get home now?\u201d he told me at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, where his portrait (fur-trimmed parka, impassive gaze) now hangs in the stairwell alongside those of Gregory and Yeats.When she wasn\u2019t at work, his mother could be an enchanting companion. Visits to the beach or mushroom-picking outings were imbued with what Barry called an \u201curgent poetic necessity.\u201d But the work of mothering, the daily round of care, never seemed to interest her. (At the end of her life, as she lay dying, a doctor told Barry she was bipolar.) His father, meanwhile, was even more disengaged. \u201cMy mother ran an enormous P.R. agency for him,\u201d Barry said. She was always telling her children how much their father loved them; it wasn\u2019t something he made clear on his own. In Barry\u2019s phrase, Frank was a \u201cSartrean nihilist\u201d who believed that, in the wake of the Second World War, \u201ceverything was over,\u201d including love and family. Which, Barry said, \u201cwas not very convenient if you happened to be his child.\u201d Paternal neglect bred sibling solidarity. \u201cMy sister was like an extension of my body,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe were the same person, in a way.\u201d (Barry also has a brother who is 12 years younger.)AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIf nothing really mattered, their father seemed to reason, then everything was allowed. In 1969, he published a collection of verse, \u201cIn Dante\u2019s Wood,\u201d subtitled \u201cLove Poems,\u201d though the love they celebrate is clearly not uxorious. \u201cYoung girls with vermilion muffs are\/semi-precious, implode the mind,\u201d one poem swoons. Another seems to describe a mistress\u2019s love letter. Barry\u2019s mother, who remained with Frank until the late 1990s, was endowed with what he called a \u201cdefensive obliviousness.\u201dSo, too, was Barry, at least for a time. While visiting London in his mid-20s, he ran into his father outside a tube station, accompanied by a woman whom Barry didn\u2019t recognize. \u201cThis is my mistress,\u201d Frank explained. \u201cYou won\u2019t tell your mother now, will you. I know you\u2019re a man of the world.\u201d On holiday in Greece a few years later, Barry confronted him. If Frank would only \u201cput down his weapons\u201d \u2014 his adultery and drinking \u2014 then he and Joan, Barry said, could still make a go of it. His father was unreceptive. \u201cYoung girls are attracted to me,\u201d he replied, \u201cand I\u2019ll never give them up.\u201d It was a crushing moment, and yet Barry seemed unable to stop hoping he might change. His first book, \u201cThe Water-Colorist,\u201d a collection of poems, came out soon after, in 1983. It is dedicated to his father.In 1987, Barry published his first full-length novel, \u201cThe Engine of Owl-Light,\u201d now long out of print. The book, which owes more than a little to Flann O\u2019Brien, the ludic Irish modernist, braids together six different stories, which range in setting from medieval Ireland to the present-day U.S. In one, a young man recalls his unusual childhood in a highly stylized, impressionistic manner. He has a loving mother, a distant yet terrifying father and an older sister who twice broke his nose. He accuses his father of multiple failings \u2014 emotional absenteeism, neglect of his wife, even wishing his own son dead \u2014 but when Frank Barry read the book, he objected to a charge the narrator doesn\u2019t make. In one chapter, in what seems like a throwaway line, the family\u2019s pet cat is likened to the father, in that both tend to go missing when you want them. Some 40 pages later, during a description of their bedtime ritual, the narrator says, in another seemingly innocuous sentence, \u201cThe black cat gets into the sister\u2019s bed at night, and burrows down where it can\u2019t breathe.\u201dThis barely noticeable conjuncture provoked in Frank an extraordinary response. After reading the passage, he went straight to his barrister to complain he\u2019d been libeled as a child molester. He wanted to bring charges against his son. The barrister, an old friend, managed to persuade him this would not be in his interest. When Barry learned what his father had said, he was stunned. He had intended no such imputation. \u201cI had to sit there for hours,\u201d Barry told me, \u201cjust trying to think what it was he could be talking about.\u201dIn the end, it was Barry\u2019s wife, the actor and screenwriter Alison Deegan, who provided him \u2014 and eventually me, during my visit \u2014 with the answer.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe two of them met in Dublin in 1985. Deegan already knew Barry\u2019s mother from the Abbey Theater\u2019s acting company, and they would later appear in several of his plays together. Deegan gave birth to twins, Coral and Merlin, in 1992. It would prove to be a destabilizing period. The first time Barry bathed his children, he was overcome with \u201can extraordinary and almost out-of-body distress,\u201d a reaction he found hard to explain.Things soon grew stranger. One day, when the twins were not yet 1, Joan came by their home in central Dublin to take them for a walk. When Deegan asked where she intended to go, her mother-in-law grew shifty. At once, Deegan realized what Joan had in mind: to show the twins to Frank, who still hadn\u2019t met them. In distress, she went to speak to Barry and told him that Frank must never see their children. When he asked her why, she replied, \u201cI\u2019m going to tell you something now, and it\u2019s going to be a huge shock.\u201dOne evening in the late 1980s, Deegan said, she and Barry\u2019s sister went out for a drink. Barry\u2019s sister was going through a difficult divorce, but that was not the only thing troubling her. She told Deegan that her father had sexually abused her when she was a young girl, insisting Frank had done it only once and that he had been drunk, as though this were somehow a mitigating factor. She also asked Deegan to keep it a secret.On some level, Barry had always known that his sister was unhappy, that there was something off about her relationship with Frank, who used to buy her outfits that seemed far too precocious for a prepubescent girl. What he learned from Deegan made appalling sense. \u201cIt was as if something had happened to you in Hebrew, and now you were being told about it in English,\u201d said Barry, who has never spoken publicly about the abuse. (Through Barry, his sister declined to be interviewed, but she gave him her blessing to tell me what occurred.)Barry at once rang his sister, who confirmed everything that Deegan had told him. At his suggestion, she began to see a therapist. Slowly it emerged that what his sister claimed was a one-off incident had in fact happened repeatedly over the course of many years. She later wrote to Frank to say that she forgave him. He never replied.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTBarry\u2019s sister did not want to bring charges or for the matter to become public, and her family respected these wishes. Unlike other Irish sex offenders brought low in the 1990s, when the scale of child abuse within the Catholic Church first became known, Frank retained his freedom and reputation. But Barry, who\u2019d already been drifting away from him, cut off contact altogether. Oftentimes, when he saw his father coming down the street, he would simply run in the opposite direction. \u201cI was frightened of him, like a child,\u201d he explained. \u201cI never lost that.\u201dImageFrom left, Barry\u2019s mother, father and sister, circa 1968.Credit...Sebastian Barry Papers\/Harry Ransom Center\/The University of Texas at AustinMany writers need an inciting obstruction. For Henry James, it was his own sexuality. For Nabokov, it was a homeland to which he could never return. For Barry, it has been a family secret that it was not his place to speak of. Learning about his father\u2019s offense was the hinge of his life as well as his career. All he\u2019d written up to this point, in his own harsh assessment, were mere apprentice pieces. In the next few years, he came into his own with a series of works in which a palpable desire, as he put it in his email, \u201cto proclaim aloud\u201d keeps running up against the necessity of silence. Barry\u2019s great breakthrough lay not in writing nakedly about his family of origin, in the vein of Philip Roth or Karl Ove Knausgaard, but in finding ways to hide them in his deeper family history \u2014 and in the history of Ireland.The work that made his name as a playwright, \u201cThe Steward of Christendom\u201d (1995), is based on the life of his paternal great-grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the pre-independence Dublin police force, of whom Barry knew nothing until his late 30s. The man he would portray as Thomas Dunne was supposed to have ordered a charge on striking workers in 1913, leaving several men dead. The existence of this relative was another shameful family secret. Following the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule, which sparked the war that led to independence, those who didn\u2019t fit the romantic narrative of national struggle, like Protestants and former Crown servants, were pushed to the margins of Irish public life. Barry, who was born in 1955, had absorbed that narrative himself. He began the play believing he was writing about a textbook traitor. Only as it evolved did he come to see Dunne as simply a man.One engine of the play\u2019s emotional drama is Thomas\u2019s conflict with his devoted son, Willie. Thomas effectively disowns the boy when he shows qualified sympathy for the 1916 rebels, then spends the rest of his life regretting it after Willie is killed while fighting for the British in the First World War. \u201cWhat big, loud talking fools are fathers sometimes,\u201d he says to Willie\u2019s hallucinated presence from the county home in Wicklow where he is living out his days. \u201cWhy do we not love our sons simply and be done with it?\u201d Barry\u2019s mother always believed that the play was about his relationship with Frank. It is certainly possible to see it as Barry\u2019s effort to imagine his way into his father\u2019s mind following their rift. It is also possible to see the play as a poignant piece of wish fulfillment. If only his father were suffering like this, there might be hope for his renewal, or even, in the future, a reconciliation.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhile many lauded Barry\u2019s depiction of a man undone by political upheaval and the sudden reversal in status it entails, others saw it as an attempted whitewash. \u201cIf Thomas Dunne or his real-life counterpart broke the skulls of working men who were desperate to earn a living, then he should not have done,\u201d wrote the British Marxist Terry Eagleton, who has Irish Catholic roots, in The London Review of Books. Barry\u2019s claim, in an introduction to the play, that his ancestor was only doing his duty, or what he took to be his duty, was, Eagleton said, \u201can excuse with a particularly unsavory history.\u201d The suggestion seemed clear: Barry was a traitor to the republican cause, cut from the same cloth as his forebear.Clearly in no rush to dispel this impression, Barry spent the coming years composing what would eventually amount to a loser\u2019s history of 20th-century Ireland. Though given to flights of rhapsodic lyricism, the books vibrate with a sublimated anger. Again and again, Barry writes characters rejected by their families and society at large, victims of unspeakable injustice who must mutely bear the wrong they\u2019ve been done. \u201cThe Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty\u201d (1998), the first of his novels about the Barry family tree, was inspired by the life of a maternal great-uncle, another policeman, who was forced to flee Ireland during the Civil War (1922-23) after receiving a death threat from a nationalist enforcer. Like Virgil\u2019s hero, Barry\u2019s Eneas spends years in exile, dutifully weathering trial after trial \u2014 as a sailor in Northern England, as a soldier at the Battle of Dunkirk, as a canal-digger in postcolonial Nigeria \u2014 but he doesn\u2019t found a city, just a poky hotel for destitute sailors on London\u2019s Isle of Dogs. \u201cAll our founding myths in Ireland have been based on revolutions and new beginnings, and I suppose I wanted to write a book that had as its shadow the reverse of that, a kind of unfounding myth,\u201d Barry has said.The novels that followed, which hopscotch between the McNultys and the Dunnes, are likewise stories of men and women whose lives were written in invisible ink. \u201cAnnie Dunne\u201d (2002) is based on a paternal great-aunt, the daughter of the police superintendent whom Barry quarried in \u201cThe Steward of Christendom.\u201d Annie (her real name) had a privileged childhood in Dublin Castle, the center of British rule \u2014 poor preparation for the long littleness of life in post-independence Ireland. Born with a hunchback that rendered her unmarriageable, she washed up on a subsistence farm in rural Wicklow. Her brother, depicted as Willie in \u201cThe Steward of Christendom,\u201d was another source of grief. He didn\u2019t just die fighting for the British Empire in World War I, at the very moment Ireland was rising up against it \u2014 the subject of a later novel, \u201cA Long Long Way\u201d (2015), one of Barry\u2019s greatest. His sacrifice, like those of the war\u2019s 200,000 Irish veterans, was met, for many decades, by a conspiracy of silence.ImageBarry in London at the announcement of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which his book \u201cA Long Long Way\u201d was shortlisted for.Credit...Leon Neal\/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images\u201cAnnie Dunne\u201d evokes a crucial episode from Barry\u2019s childhood when he and his sister, aged 4 and 6, spent nine months living with their great-aunt on the farm in Wicklow while their parents looked for work in London. Barry and his sister were like the children she never had, late blossoms in a desiccated life. For them, she proved to be \u201ca very philosopher and almost inventor of mothering,\u201d as Barry once said, yet his novel portrays her without sentimentality. His Annie is rugged and resourceful as well as brittle and aloof, stung by her family\u2019s precipitous decline: milking cows and mucking out manure are not how she\u2019d imagined spending her old age. But her life is not in vain, Barry movingly suggests, for she makes all the difference in the lives of her two charges. \u201cWill they remember anything of these days?\u201d she wonders of the children.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIf the novel seems to offer a resounding affirmation, one startling episode complicates the picture. On a bright summer morning, Annie goes to wake the children and finds them lying naked together in the same bed. \u201cThe boy is huddled between her legs, his face down near where her body joins at the center, near that special place that should be foreign to all eyes.\u201d As their aunt stands there unobserved, the girl tells her brother to \u201cgive it little licks.\u201d What Annie has witnessed puzzles her intermittently for the rest of the book. Was it just a game? Or was it a sign of something more troubling? At one point, while she lies sleepless in bed, \u201ca strange thought\u201d occurs to her. \u201cThe thought was but a shadow, a hint. Something about Trevor\u201d \u2014 the children\u2019s father \u2014 and \u201cthe little girl, a notion I could not make clear to myself.\u201d Hamstrung by modesty, she is unable to raise the subject with the children, or with anybody else.After speaking to his sister, Barry tried to tell his mother what had happened to her, but it was, he said, a \u201cthankless task.\u201d Though Joan heard him out as he recounted the details, she would later speak as though she had no memory of them. Barry suspects this selective amnesia was a strategy she learned from her own traumatic childhood. In moments of lucidity, Joan insisted she\u2019d known nothing of the abuse, which Barry wanted desperately to believe. In reality, this was highly unlikely. When the family was living in London in the early 1960s, Joan had spent a few weeks in Cork performing in a play. Later, after she was told what Frank had done, she said of this period, \u201cI knew I shouldn\u2019t have left.\u201dBarry seems to have taken the remark as grist for \u201cOld God\u2019s Time\u201d (2023), a raw-nerved meditation on memory, truth and the problem of evil nested within what appears to be a crime novel. It features an actress who goes by her maiden name, Miss McNulty, and her young son, Jesse. She is in flight from her husband, whom she suspects (but cannot prove) is somehow responsible for their daughter\u2019s recent death. In one scene, she recounts the trauma to her next-door neighbor, a retired detective who is the novel\u2019s main character:\u201cFirst she had noticed problems with her daughter\u2019s body. She had brought her to the doctor in London because there was blood in her rectum \u2014 the child was only a little girl of 6, and she had no idea what was wrong. The only thing she could think of was colitis, something like that. The doctor was in his 50s and not very concerned, and indeed the bleeding stopped for a good long while. But after she\u2019d been away in Ireland working for a few weeks down in Cork, she discovered the bleeding again when she came back. She had not the slightest clue what was causing it.\u201dIn light of what Barry had learned, he began to reflect on the distress he\u2019d felt while bathing his children. \u201cIn these ancient cases, there are no proofs possible,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt is all memory, half-memory and even absence of memory, when we are too young to register what is happening.\u201d And yet, he went on, \u201cI could in no way guarantee that my father didn\u2019t do something to me.\u201d In the late 1990s, Barry suffered a nervous breakdown. Around the same time, he and Deegan bought a 19th-century rectory in southwest Wicklow. The place was an unsightly wreck \u2014 roughcast exterior, hideous double-glazing. They spent two years restoring it, a therapeutic task. \u201cHe found a moat and pulled up the drawbridge and got on with his work,\u201d said the Irish novelist Colm Toibin, one of Barry\u2019s closest friends. \u201cBut there were demons that could not be got rid of.\u201dHe tried to confront them in 2010, when he wrote Frank a letter about the abuse, a subject they had never discussed. It contained a forensic list of everything Frank had done to his daughter, from the actual violation to his refusal to acknowledge it. \u201cThank you for your very civilized letter,\u201d Frank wrote in his response, which contained an invitation to meet for lunch. He promised to explain why his son was mistaken. Barry agreed, but when Deegan heard about the plan, she told him not to go, fearing for his well-being. So Barry rang his father to cancel.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTA year or so later, Barry got word that his father had Alzheimer\u2019s and called him to ask if they could meet in Dublin. They eventually agreed to have lunch at a hotel. Barry\u2019s son Merlin volunteered to go with him. The conversation was awkward from the start. As Barry was describing his mother\u2019s last illness, through which he had nursed her a few years before, Frank rose to his feet and began pacing the room. Sitting back down again, he extended his arms to reveal his wrists, which were crosshatched with scars. His father, Barry realized, had tried to kill himself. \u201cI don\u2019t want to play the blame game,\u201d Frank declared to his son, \u201cbut this was because of your letter.\u201dMerlin, aghast, said it was time for them to leave. Barry and his father would never speak again.One afternoon during my stay, Barry, Deegan and their third child, Toby, who was visiting from Dublin, sat drinking tea in the blossoming garden outside the rectory. Like the heather-flushed hills it looks out on, the Georgian house is built stoutly of granite. Sunlight strained through a gray lid of cloud, as the couple\u2019s seven dogs yipped at their feet. \u201cSilencio!\u201d Barry commanded, to no obvious effect.Barry\u2019s response to having Frank as a father was to raise his children in the opposite manner, to give them what he\u2019s called \u201cthe bounty of safety,\u201d which he and his sister were painfully denied. Toby, who came out to his parents in 2015, shortly before Ireland\u2019s referendum on gay marriage, said he had always felt that bounty. \u201cEven before I told them,\u201d he said, \u201cI knew it was going to be OK.\u201d \u201cDays Without End,\u201d the first novel in Barry\u2019s loose American trilogy, was partially inspired by Toby, to whom the book is dedicated.Barry is no stranger to the United States; he has spent stretches of time there since holding a fellowship at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop in the mid-1980s. \u201cI have a sort of citizenship of America that no American government, especially the current one, would recognize,\u201d he said, speaking of the vast trans-Atlantic Irish diaspora. Barry learned about his ancestor Thomas McNulty, who fled to the States in the 1840s never to return, from his maternal grandfather, the prolific talker. This unfinished story was an imaginative goad, but Barry also did plenty of research, reading hundreds of books on American history.Some of this research was brought to bear on a lengthy first chapter about McNulty\u2019s Irish childhood and the death of his family in the Great Famine. After nine months of work, Barry came to realize that the chapter wasn\u2019t right. These were the very last things that McNulty would want to talk about. The episode was cut from 30 pages to three paragraphs. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the end of that, I say, I don\u2019t want to say no more,\u201d McNulty announces at the end of them, sealing the subject into the past.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTExcept the past is never so easily sequestered. \u201cI only say it because without saying it I don\u2019t think anything can be properly understood,\u201d he goes on a moment later, alluding to the violence he seems fated to commit. In one horrific scene, a massacre of American Indians is couched in uncomfortably domestic terms when McNulty and his comrades dig a pair of mass graves for the innocents they\u2019ve slaughtered. \u201cWhen all the bodies were in,\u201d he reports, \u201cwe covered over the pits with the soil we had left, like we were putting pastry tops on two enormous pies.\u201dThough Barry appreciates that it can be \u201ca perilous business\u201d for a white male novelist to write across differences of gender and race, as he does in the American trilogy, the alternative strikes him as worse. \u201cWhen it comes to people saying you can\u2019t write characters that aren\u2019t the same as you, that\u2019s the end of literature,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt is the deepest form of love to try to imagine your way into somebody else\u2019s condition.\u201d The terror and sense of vulnerability his father inspired in him seems to find an objective correlative in the violent frontier, especially as it was experienced by its nonwhite inhabitants.Image\u201cWhen it comes to people saying you can\u2019t write characters that aren\u2019t the same as you, that\u2019s the end of literature. It is the deepest form of love to try to imagine your way into somebody else\u2019s condition.\u201dCredit...Gareth McConnell for The New York TimesOne of the great achievements of the books is how distinct its three narrators sound from one another, how rightly they are fitted with their own persuasive idiolect. Thomas McNulty, who would have grown up speaking Irish, like a majority of his countrymen before the Great Famine, is powerfully estranged from the English language, a tool of British colonial oppression, even as he wields it with a reckless incandescence. Winona, upgraded to narrator in the second novel, \u201cA Thousand Moons,\u201d is given to a more \u201cproper\u201d style of expression. Her literacy and numeracy are her means of livelihood (she works as a clerk in the local law office), but her command of words also sharpens her sense of how coercive they can be. When a suitor sends her a comically bloodless proposal letter (\u201cI hereby and to thee declare that my wish and love remain intacter\u201d), she feels she must marry him not because she wants to but because of \u201cthe official terms I had been addressed with, like a treaty paper between Washington and the Sioux.\u201dBouguereau, meanwhile, receives an education at a newly founded college for the formerly enslaved in nearby Nashville, and it shows in his speech. If English, for the Irish, was an unmotherly tongue imposed from above, for the Black bondsman it was a means of freedom, and acquiring it a subversive act: as Frederick Douglass\u2019s owner put it, literacy would \u201cforever unfit him to be a slave.\u201d Douglass, who toured Ireland in the mid-1840s and drew parallels between the Black and Irish freedom struggles, wrote an ornate, Ciceronian prose that implicitly defied racist beliefs about the expressive powers of African Americans. Barry read Douglass closely while preparing to write \u201cThe Newer World,\u201d but he told me that a closer model for Bouguereau\u2019s voice was Henry Ossian Flipper\u2019s \u201cThe Colored Cadet at West Point\u201d (1878), whose style is more relaxed, less overtly rhetorical.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn \u201cThe Newer World,\u201d Bouguereau\u2019s desire for revenge against Petrie, his sister\u2019s violator, continues unabated through his remarkable life, which takes him from the concert halls of Britain, where he performs as a member of a celebrated Black choir, to the bloodied plains of the American West. Late in the book, he gets his chance when, during a visit to Tennessee, he spots Petrie on horseback, singing to himself on a deserted country road. He has the man in the sights of his rifle, which was given to him by his former enslaver. Yet he can\u2019t pull the trigger. \u201cWhy I did it I hardly knew, but I threw old Luther\u2019s sacred gift into the trees.\u201dThe decision is mysterious to the reader as well. Is it a pragmatic calculation? A principled refusal to answer violence with violence? Or is it a case of a white author reluctant to make his characters of color as vividly ruthless or aggressive as his pale ones, for fear of perpetuating baleful stereotypes? One thought I shared with Barry was that Bouguereau\u2019s gesture and, in a way, the whole book, read almost like an allegory of his decision not to write about his parents. \u201cI\u2019m trying to throw my rifle down,\u201d he told me, speaking of his father. \u201cEven if they don\u2019t exist, I don\u2019t want him committed to the flames of hell.\u201dIf Barry has spent his life telling secrets, he is a large-souled gossip, a writer who forgives people behind their backs. \u201cNo man is beyond redemption,\u201d Thomas Dunne says in \u201cThe Steward of Christendom,\u201d and it\u2019s clear that Barry, a longtime agnostic, devoutly believes this. For all their sins and dubious allegiances, his characters are intensely lovable \u2014 precisely what Eagleton so disapproved of. That Barry, who was once considered suspiciously un-Irish, is now embraced in his homeland is in part a reflection of how much Ireland has changed in recent decades. Foster, the historian, told me that his friend\u2019s work has helped to bring that change about, loosening the grip of nationalist dogma and \u201callowing for a much more complex sense of the identities available to Irish people.\u201dMore than any social legacy, Barry considers the family he has built with Deegan as the thing he\u2019s most proud of. \u201cThis will be our monument to the brief time we\u2019ve spent in the world,\u201d he said \u2014 though his characters are family as well, and in more than one sense. His aunt Annie Dunne died many years ago, but Barry thinks about her almost every day. \u201cAnd similarly, I feel that Thomas McNulty is always around somewhere,\u201d he told me in his garden, with its willow and its hawthorn, where the leaden clouds had briefly given way. \u201cOr that I could be within a whisper of Tennyson, just sitting in the sunlight here. They are what give me my share of happiness \u2014 my children, my wife, some of my friends and the characters in my books.\u201dIn 2021, when Barry was planning his lecture, \u201cThe Fog of Family,\u201d he decided it was time to speak plainly about what he and his sister, who had long since remarried and was living abroad, had been through. When he sent her a draft, however, she grew alarmed. Her fear, as Barry remembers, was that Frank would try to kill himself again. At his sister\u2019s request, Barry made redactions, removing any mention of what she had suffered.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThis is what accounts for the lecture\u2019s strange tone, what might be called its evasive candor. \u201cI fear the fog I have tried to describe can never clear, except briefly,\u201d Barry said at the end. \u201cThe door opens onto clear country, it closes again.\u201d Even now, nearly five years after his father\u2019s death, he seems unable to bring him into focus. While it was clear how completely he believes his sister\u2019s story, he sometimes spoke as though he hoped Frank might be innocent.His father, he said, could be extremely generous, often lending money to friends who were in need. In his younger days, he was widely beloved in certain Dublin circles, celebrated for his wit and conversation. He even had a group of what Barry called \u201cdisciples.\u201d One of them, an artist, painted him as Christ, to whom he was said to bear a resemblance. Barry keeps the portrait in his office, where it is turned to face the wall.Giles Harvey is a contributing writer for the magazine who often writes profiles of novelists and directors.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
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