Skip to main content

'Ok, let's do your stupid idea' A book by Patrick Freyne

 

Patrick Freyne's heartfelt memoir addresses the comic and tragic with a lightness of touch that makes reading it a joy.

For me a particularly affecting essay is when Patrick, describes his experiences supporting a young woman living with a significant disability and additionally disabled by the continual fractures in relationships that are characteristic of organised 'care'. Our systems of care continue to be modelled on an arcane system that removes people from their communities and families. Neither does it sustain or respect the relationships, of the people living in these systems. There are many strands here, touching on the value we put on roles that are vital for the functioning of our communities yet seem to be continually devalued. Of course, these roles are typically female roles. Freyne illustrates the genuine kindness displayed by those operating within this flawed system, yet also reveals how their benevolence cannot rectify the deep-rooted flaws within the very structure itself. It seems obvious that families need support to sustain them, that went people live independently they need to do so in a community of their choosing, with the option for continuity in their relationship and access to justice to rebalance the system in their favour. We know there are solutions, yet our view of what is possible is obstructed by the very system we are trying to change.

I left this book feeling like I knew Patrick, that he had shared a part of himself. Well done Patrick, it was a real pleasure getting to know you.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Americanah a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a hymn to the complexity of our emotional lives. It is a novel where many things are said, but these are the things that I heard; 1) there is comfort in cheap chocolate. 2) she shows us how arbitrary brutality pervades our world and some of this is not intentional cruelty; it's just the systemic faceless kind. 3) Harm is a temporal thing, it can happen in an instant and we'll live with it for the rest of our lives. This is obvious in a car crash, but here it is of the emotional kind. Growing into a malignant burden that corrupts the rest of our relationships, and each of us kills the things we love. 4) It's a book about place and identity that rails against those narrow confines of identity. Her characters resist all attempts to be defined or sully themselves in narrow trenches of how to be. 'Ring out false pride in place and blood' 6) Adichie is a woman, who knows her place and that place is among the classics. She has a character joke about the...
Post a Comment
Read more

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

When I started this book, George Floyd was alive.  His name was known only to his loved ones, friends and community.  Now his daughter is without her Daddy, and we know his name.   Imagine a mountain of corpses, George's body is flung somewhere near the top of this pile.  I say near the top since bodies have been added since his murder.  Hochschild's points to the nameless dead, beneath poor George's black body.   Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost needs to be widely read. While it deals with the particular horrors of King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo, it makes clear that the butchery characteristic of King Leopold’s reign were features of all European colonies. I first moved from Ireland to England in 1995.  Quickly making English friends, one of the striking observations was how these otherwise well informed and articulate individuals knew next to nothing about Ireland, it’s history and how that history informed it’s current p...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie. A review and some thoughts.

Dale Carnegie's 1936, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People,' has remaining in continuous print since 1936, selling over 30 million copies.  Something is selling here.  Carnegie has distilled a distinct ideology one deeply ingrained in the Western corporate world’s ethos of mandatory optimism.  While Carnegie's insights are not inherently flawed, their luminescence casts a particularly dense umbra. Carnegie's book aligns with something we know about ourselves, echoing George Orwell's observation: 'The best books tell you what you already know.' The book plays into our innate longing for acceptance and affirmation, fostering a confirmation bias where we gravitate towards ideas that affirm our pre-existing beliefs. Reading Carnegie I could not help thinking of it's antithesis. Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' (1949) delves into the perilous consequences of such biases.  Willy Loman, epitomises the tragic fallout of conflating charm,...
Post a Comment
Read more