From Emma to Denis: ‘let’s share a cynical roll of the eye’

Dear Denis,

We (your eight children) used to make fun of you for remembering WB Yeats’s or James Joyce’s birthdays more easily than ours. But now I am a parent and a writer too, I can sympathise. When I dash off to meet my kids at the school bus stop at the all-too-soon end of my working day, my head is often so full of my fictional creations that I have difficulty focusing on any aspect of real life.

My son and daughter may grow up resenting me for my absentmindedness, the way my eyes slide off towards a page of text while I’m talking to them . . . but they’ll also remember having a deeply fulfilled mother whose work made her leap out of bed every morning, and there’s a lot to be said for that. They don’t have to be the only source of my happiness; I lean on them, but only lightly.

Something else I used to tease you for was your venerability, because you and Frances had me at 42 (the runt of the litter, as I was known). When I studied Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations for my Inter Cert, I took to calling you “Aged Parent”, like the speechless old man by the fire in that book. But from my current perspective of 43, you – still lecturing and writing brilliant books, much the same as ever, at 85 – hardly seem to have changed at all: the gap between us has shrunk.

Father’s Day is something that didn’t exist in the Ireland of my childhood. Yet another American import, I suppose; let’s share a cynical roll of the eye. But happy Father’s Day anyway, and I hope you’re reading something so brilliant it makes you forget what day it is.

Love always,
Emma