Hello, everyone!
I thought I'd share a reading I did of one of my favorite scenes from be guid tae yer mammy at Brixton BookJam last year. Apologies for how nervous I am at the beginning!
In it, the book's protagonist Jeannie goes to her big audition, but it doesn't quite go to plan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8PevOCyy0w&t=190s
Hopefully, this scene, and the preface which is available to read here, helps to whet your appetite for the book itself! Although, it's worth noting that both are even better in the book's final form.
I've also attached a wee story below about one of be guid tae yer mammy's biggest themes, religion. It's set in Scotland, but as I'm sure of you might notice, the speakers are Irish. Enjoy!
Mind the Gap
This is Dalmuir. This train is for Glasgow Queen Street Low Level. The next stop is Singer.
Bang. They’re at it again, I thought. Neds were dropping rocks on top of the train as it passed through a tunnel. Bang.
“Jaysus, Mary and Joseph,” Cathy said, shaking her head.
I couldn’t judge them. My Grandpa used to take me down the lane to smash glass bottles when I was wee and I’d thought everywhere was like Glasgow until Dad got a job in California and Mum said it was an act of God. The first place we visited when we moved to Sunnyvale was called Half Moon Bay. I exchanged shards of broken glass for miles of golden sand.
But Sunnyvale wasn’t always sunny. Just outside of our apartment complex you could hear banging from gunshots instead of neds. I remember going to Walmart and thinking that the Young Team would have a field day if they could go to ASDA and buy Buckfast and an air rifle.
“D’ya believe in the hereafter?” Gerry asked.
“Been brought up Catholic, but my Mum knows I’m kind of like, I dunno, undecided, I guess. I’m undecided,” I said. “I worked in a nursing home so I saw a lot of death from when I was really young, so that makes you think.”
“And as a young girl, that didn’t affect ya?”
“It did, yeah. I was seventeen when I started working there. My Grandpa died when I was twelve, and a few other people I knew had died but I’d never been exposed to it, not like that, it was like was full-on exposure,” I explained. “I never really had any training or anything like that, I just got thrown in. Like, you know, ‘On you go, you’ll be fine’, and it was like ‘Oh God, this is hard’.”
I looked out of the train window, and my thoughts turned to the nursing home, to Agnes. One morning, when Agnes sat in Barra’s breakfast room smiling, I noticed that her teeth were covered in what looked like chocolate cake. When I walked over to her, I was struck by the nauseating smell of shite.
“I’m not too hungry this morning,” she said, assuming that I was going to ask her what she wanted for breakfast. “I just had some cake.”
Oh god, I thought, turning around to fetch a carer to clean her teeth.
As we travelled into Glasgow, I couldn’t get Agnes out of my mind. The tall ship, riverside museum and Hydro blurred into a landscape I was too disillusioned to blink into focus, even though it was a bright, summer’s day.
“I would love to be like Josie,” Cathy said.
“Well, I believe in things for a reason!” Gerry said.
“She has a deep belief. I would love to be like her,” Cathy said. “I’ve often said it to her on the phone. I’m sure she says to herself this woman is a, what do you call it, a communist or something.”
“My Mum’s like that,” I said, “completely and utterly 100%.”
“Who’s that, your mother?” Gerry added, and then turned to Cathy, “You believe that some things happen for a reason.”
“I think things happen for a reason,” Cathy said, “but I don’t see why our Lord would let young children come into the world, and then all of a sudden take them out again. I question. I shouldn’t question.”
“That’s where your faith comes in,” Gerry said.
Please mind the gap when alighting from the train.