In the opening pages of My Father Left Me Ireland, Michael Brendan Dougherty's epistolary memoir, he remembers a visit to his Irish father, on his native soil, when he was six. His father had neither married his mother, nor come back to America with her. Which leaves that “his” in “his native soil” strained—it cannot cover both Dougherty and his father, no matter how much either man might regret his division from the other.
What Dougherty remembers is, “the way you ended your sentences with a suggestive ‘you know.' To this boy's ears, it was an invitation to be with you in every story.” My Father Left Me Ireland is his attempt, as a new father himself, to look back over his life and see to what extent he and his father could or do share a story, a language, a home.
Dougherty's fatherlessness was obvious, to him and to everyone around him. But the more he tried to prepare an accounting of himself for his impending daughter (“It occurred to me that in a few months I would have this life wriggling across my lap. I would have to tell her who she is.”) the more he noticed that the spaces his father left unfilled weren't the only ways he'd been orphaned.
There wasn't just an absence in his immediate family, but in the whole village that allegedly raises a child. Dougherty writes, “The adult world that I encountered was plainly terrified of having authority over children and tried to exercise as little of it as practicable. […] The constant message of authority figures was that I should be true to myself. I should do what I loved, and I could love whatever I liked. I was the authority.”
He could write to his father, he could order Gaelic books, but there was no clear way to regain what had been given up by the generations that came before. Dougherty's book is full of a coiled fury. His anger is not against his father, who he comes to understand longed for him as well. His forgiveness doesn't lessen the wound he, his father, and his mother all sustained from his family's fracturing, but it allows him to reach across the gap to offer and receive love now.
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