In 2005 when John McGahern published his Memoir he revealed for the first time in explicit
detail the specific nature of the autobiographical dimension of his fiction a dimension he had
hitherto either denied or mystified. Taking Memoir as a paradigmatic work of memory confession
and imaginative recovery this book is a close reading of McGahern's novels that discovers his
narrative poiesis in both the fiction and the memoir to be a single continuous and coherent
mythopoeic project concealed within the career of a novelist writing ostensibly in the realist
tradition of modern Irish fiction. McGahern's total body of work centres around the experiences
of loss memory and imaginative recovery. To read his fiction as an art of memory is to
recognize how he used story-telling to confront the extended grief and anger that blighted his
early life and that shaped his sense of self and world. It is also to understand how he
gradually painfully and honestly wrote his way out of the darkness and despair of the early
work into the luminous celebration of life and the world in his great last novel That They May
Face the Rising Sun.
