A Day at a Time by Mary Kenny, New Island Books, £13.99
Mary Kenny is a veteran journalist who describes her career as the “modest success of remaining in work for over 50 years”. She is also an author and, of course, a popular Catholic Herald columnist. In these “Thoughts and Reflections through the Seasons”, as the subtitle puts it, she has assembled a miscellany of reflections, anecdotes and stories that demonstrate her unique stance, one that is humorous, tolerant, trenchant and sage.
Her subjects are wide-ranging, showing her insatiable curiosity and appetite for life. They include thoughts on Irish history, favourite poems, saints’ lives, existential philosophers and personal admissions. Each extract is barely a page long, designed to be dipped into rather than read sequentially. However, such is Mary’s beguiling voice that I read the book in one sitting.
The passages I liked best, being of Irish extraction myself, were those showing the proverbial wisdom of the author’s Irish relations, such as Aunt Norah, who used to say: “When you’re too good, you’re no good”; or Aunty Dorothy, who believed that “a woman’s attitude to her husband’s revenue should be: ‘What’s thine is mine; but what’s mine is my own.’ ”
When Kenny married, her mother told her: “Never let the sun go down on your anger” and “Never give a man bad news on an empty stomach.”
Kenny’s own advice to young people reflects her strong if understated faith, as well as a certain stoical resolve: “You live in a vale of tears. Get used to it.”
One anecdote that could only come from Ireland concerns the Kenny family housekeeper, Lizzie, who was, in Kenny’s wonderful phrase, “merrily morbid”. Looking after Mary’s brother Carlos as a young boy in Dublin, she would often take him to see drowned sailors “stretched out in the mortuary in Ringsend”. Child psychologists will doubtless be aghast at this, but Lizzie’s imperturbable response was that “some of these poor fellows made a ‘lovely corpse’ ”.
A chapter called “Chance Decision” relates that her grandmother Mary Conroy, “a Connemara schoolteacher with high-minded aspirations who thought about becoming a nun”, made the most important decision of her life by going into a church and telling herself: “If someone comes in by the main door of the church, I’ll get married. If someone comes in by the side door, I’ll enter the convent.” As fate (or Providence) would have it, someone entered the church by the main door.
Kenny is humble, telling the reader that she has “only recently learned what ‘empiricist’ means”. She is also honest about her past life. A member of Alcoholics Anonymous, she chose AA’s well-known motto as the title of her book (indeed, it is sensible rule of life for everyone; I was once given similar advice in the confessional).
To a friend who asked her, “Why did you change from being a wild child and a bad girl in the 1960s and 1970s?” she responds succinctly: “You grow up; you grow old.”
We learn that Casablanca is Kenny’s favourite film of all time; that she is a hypochondriac; that she has had Botox and that she has two tattoos: a “sweet little shamrock” on her upper arm, and for the other, after considering the pithy sayings of Beckett, Einstein, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, she settled on John Henry Newman’s “To live is to change …”, admitting that so far she has put off having the remainder of the quotation – “and to be perfect is to have changed often” – inscribed.
Kenny has opinions on everything, as her chapter headings show: “Liberation from Corsets”, “Love is Not All You Need”, “Forgiveness – A Tough Call” and “The Glamour of Crime” are only a few of many I could have cited. They are always worth reading and pondering.
Anyone who has enjoyed her newspaper and magazine columns over the years will find this anthology a treat.
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