The authors of the three memoirs I analyse in this chapter are all second-generation Irish men who grew up in working-class neighbourhoods of post-war London and explore this experience from the perspective of middle age. In the course of writing about their backgrounds, they regenerate themes and tropes familiar from texts in the previous two parts of this study. These occur in relation to narratives of nationality and gender, and also with regard to religion, class and sexuality. The conflicts and disjunctions of belonging that ensue are in part common experiences of childhood and adolescence, but in other ways they are specific to the way in which these different narratives of identity intersect for subjects of Irish descent. They are apparent in both the public and private domains but also at locations such as church and school, which are neither wholly public nor wholly private but contain elements of both. The ‘confluence of narrativity’ between personal and collective notions of identity is often most pronounced in such intermediate zones, graphically illustrating a crisis of belonging for the subject concerned. Where the accounts differ from each other is in the extent to which the individuals concerned overcome such disjunctions, something which, in turn, influences the attitude of each author to his own memories and the nature of the identities configured in each text. These are not just personal testimonies, therefore, but interventions in a much broader spectrum of narrative diaspora space. Ien Ang argues that such interventions amount to the ‘rhetorical construction of a “self” for public not private purposes: the displayed self is a strategically fabricated performance’. For this reason, I pay particular attention to the ways in which each memoir is ‘driven by its own fictive conventions’ and employs performative strategies to configure identities through narrative.

The Grass Arena (1988) by John Healy

John Healy's prize-winning autobiography is a harrowing account of the destitution and violence he experienced as a down-and-out. As Colin McCabe remarks in his introduction: ‘Beside it, a book like Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London seems a rather inaccurate tourist guide.’ In the early chapters, which I focus on here, Healy describes his childhood as the youngest son of a poor Irish immigrant family in Kentish Town in the late 1940s and 1950s and his eventual descent into alcoholism, prison and vagrancy.