‘My Buried Life’ by Doreen Finn

Fiction – paperback; New Island Books; 254 pages; 2015. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Irish writer Doreen Finn’s My Buried Life is a remarkably accomplished, confident and polished debut novel set in Dublin after the economic crash.

A return to Dublin

It tells the story of a New York-based poet and academic in her late 30s who returns to her childhood home after the death of her mother. But Eva Perry, who narrates the story, doesn’t expect to stay long: she simply wants to tidy up her mother’s affairs and head back to her life in Manhattan as quickly as possible.

Yet things are not straightforward, for Eva is nursing deeply felt hurts — she’s recently broken off an affair with a married man, whom she loved — and now all the painful memories of her childhood come rushing back: the complicated relationship she had with her estranged mother, the unexplained death of her father when she was just four years old and then the depression and suicide of her older brother when she was 16.

And then there’s the ongoing problem she has with alcohol:

I want to stop drinking again. I can’t keep on doing what I’ve been doing since I got back to Dublin. I can’t live a healthy or productive life if my principal objective each day is to count the minutes until I allow myself a drink. It’s starting to show on my face, in my body. […] I don’t want to be that woman, alone with her books and empty bottles. I actually don’t know what I do want, but I don’t want that.

Melancholy, hope and humour

This probably makes My Buried Life sound quite maudlin — I mean, come on, in the first few chapters there’s already been a funeral, a suicide, a confession about alcoholism and a broken love affair  — but Eva is such a fascinating character, and her voice is so heartfelt, honest and often self-deprecating, that the story doesn’t feel as if it is wallowing in the gloom of it all. Instead, the narrative is infused with a well-balanced sense of melancholia but there’s also a slow burning anger at its core, which gives the story a sharp little edge. And the secrets, which are slowly revealed one by one as the story unfolds, make it a particularly compelling read.

It’s very much a book about “home” — where is it if you are an immigrant, what makes it and how it shapes us — and the displacement felt when returning to the place where you grew up after a long time away. I especially loved Eva’s withering commentary about how Dublin had changed —  for the worse — while she’d been gone:

Political discussion on the radio […] washes over me like sea foam, numbing in its repetition. The lies, the accusations, the nonsense about the imploded property market, as though property were the only thing wrong with this country. As though politicians and cute hoors hadn’t been ripping Ireland off in every guise imaginable since the dawn of independence, and now, when they’re still at it, people are somehow required to be surprised, shocked that any of this could have happened. I want to point the finger of blame at them all, the bankers, the politicos, all who allowed this to happen, with their mock shock, their disbelief that this could be happening to Ireland. Poster child for neo-liberal politics. Celtic Tiger indeed.

But this is also a book about second chances (I suspect the Irish economy may well be a metaphor for Eva’s own life) and it’s filled with many tender moments as Eva finds herself becoming intimate with a new circle of friends and lovers. In its exploration of family, loyalty and the secrets that bind us to one another, My Buried Life shows one woman’s struggle to accept her past in order to move into the future. It’s written in lush, almost musical prose, and while it may be Doreen Finn’s first book, I’m pretty sure it won’t be her last…