At 29, Kevin Jack McEnroe calls his grandmother, the actress Joanna Moore, his “guardian angel.” He credits her, and his debut novel Our Town, a fictionalized account of Moore’s life and struggles with failed relationships and substance abuse, with helping him come to know himself better. So much so that got a tattoo of her on his left arm just after the book was published.
Moore (named Dorothy White in the novel, a reference to her full given name of Dorothy Joanne Cook), along with actor Ryan O’Neal, are the parents of actress Tatum O’Neal, McEnroe’s mother. His father is the famed tennis player John McEnroe. Both his grandmother and mother lost custody of their children as a result of substance abuse and were often the subjects of tabloid articles.
When I was a kid my father would take us for drives to County Clare, or as he called it, “Biddy Early country.” We’d drive the back road, so narrow that the trees on either side reached across to each other, pass through the tiny village of Portroe, and stop at the top of a hill at a place called the Lookout to take in the view across Lough Derg to County Clare on the far shore. It was really something to see from so high up. The Shane MacGowan song, “The Broad Majestic Shannon” comes to mind as I write this, and I’m struck with a pang of something akin to homesickness. (After 40 years in America, our farm in Tipperary is still home.) My fit of nostalgia has been brought on by Rosemary Rogers’s “Wild Irish Women” piece in this magazine.
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By Mark Williams
In the midst of the Celtic Revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, W.B. Yeats implored his Irish literary compatriots to “go where Homer went.” It was an audacious urging, to formalize a relationship between Ireland’s mythological pantheon and the classical gods of ancient continental Europe, to write into existence as rich a cultural and literary heritage as the Greco-Roman deities held in the popular canonic imagination. The task, taken on by Yeats, as well as writers like George Russell, Austin Clarke, and Lady Gregory, was somewhat complicated by the fact that until the century prior, the mere intellectual concept of a native pantheon of Irish gods was unavailable to Irish writers, having largely been abandoned by the late middle ages. Moreover, writes Mark Williams in his excellent new book on the subject of Irish gods, they are notorious shape shifters.
Des Bishop Is Seriously Funny | Irish America irishamerica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishamerica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.