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About Walking With Ghosts
Product Description “Make no mistake about it: Walking with Ghosts is a masterpiece. A book that will wring out our tired hearts. It is by turns poetic, moving, and very funny. You will find it on the shelf alongside other great Irish memoirs including those by Frank McCourt, Nuala O'Faolain and Edna O’Brien.” —Colum McCann As a young boy growing up in the outskirts of Dublin, Gabriel Byrne sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Born to working class parents and the eldest of six children, he harbored a childhood desire to become a priest. When he was eleven years old, Byrne found himself crossing the Irish Sea to join a seminary in England. Four years later, Byrne had been expelled and he quickly returned to his native city. There he took odd jobs as a messenger boy and a factory laborer to get by. In his spare time, he visited the cinema where he could be alone and yet part of a crowd. It was here that he could begin to imagine a life beyond the grey world of 60s Ireland. He reveled in the theatre and poetry of Dublin’s streets, populated by characters as eccentric and remarkable as any in fiction, those who spin a yarn with acuity and wit. It was a friend who suggested Byrne join an amateur drama group, a decision that would change his life forever and launch him on an extraordinary forty-year career in film and theatre. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and reflections on stardom in Hollywood and Broadway, Byrne also courageously recounts his battle with addiction and the ambivalence of fame. Walking with Ghosts is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking as well as a lyrical homage to the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies. Amazon.com Review Editors' pick: Walking with Ghosts would be a fascinating, moving, lyrical, and touchingly funny memoir even if one didn’t know its subject and author were actor Gabriel Byrne. Avoiding the celebrity-studded tell-all, Byrne, with the wonder of someone examining pieces of sea glass, touchingly and self-deprecatingly recounts the people and events that shaped him and set him on his life’s path." —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor Review Praise for Walking with Ghosts "Emotional, evocative prose" --New York Times "Dreamy, lyrical, and utterly unvarnished. Writes passionately about first love and hilariously about life as an actor " --Colm Toibin, The Irish Times "[Byrne] writes with much more depth than the typical celebrity memoirist, accessing some of Heaney's earthiness and Joyce's grasp of how Catholic guilt can shape an artist...possesses a winning dry humor that reads as authentically humble...Byrne is an impressive chronicler. A melancholy but gemlike memoir, elegantly written and rich in hard experience."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Actor Byrne channels his fellow countrymen and Ireland's literary masters--Beckett, Heaney, Joyce, Yeats--to create an exceptionally lyrical and expressive memoir about his childhood and early career... Bracingly revealing about his struggle with alcoholism, achingly passionate about the Ireland of his youth, and piercingly frank about his acting life, Byrne is a vivid, evocative, and sumptuously compelling memoirist." --Booklist Walking With Ghosts is lavish with lyricism, but presents a pretty unvarnished version of its author... The book is also a conscious departure: stylistically ambitious, purposefully (and successfully) so. --The Guardian (UK) "The wonder of this memoir is its unembellished truth. It is written by a man whose amazing story is the stuff of Literature." --Edna O' Brien "Make no mistake about it: Walking with Ghosts is a masterpiece. A book that will wring out our tired hearts. It is by turns poetic, moving, and very funny. You will find it on the shelf alongside other great Irish memoirs including those by Frank McCourt, Nuala O'Faolain and Edna O'Brien." --C
