cells

'Are you going into town today?' she says, which annoys me because it's something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, 'Jesus, Mum, not this again.'

She is wounded by my tone, and I decide not to bring up what I intended to bring up, about the past, and about my need for her to apologise for it.

Gavin McCrea is a writer who has lived abroad for his entire adult life. Now though, he is staying in a small flat in south Dublin with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has returned home to care for her and to write. But all he finds he can write about is her.

He unspools an intimate story of his upbringing and early adulthood: feeling out of place in the affluent suburb in which he grew up, the homophobic bullying he suffered at school, his brother's mental illness and drug addiction, his father's death, his own devastating diagnosis, his struggles and triumphs as a writer, and above all, always, his relationship with his mother. Her brightness shines a light over his childhood, but her betrayal of his teenage self leads to years of resentment and disconnection. Now, he must find a way to reconcile with her, before it is too late.