A memoir like no other, A Single Headstrong Heart passionately and intelligently reveals both the era and the individual. Funny, quirky and touching, this latest offering from Kevin Myers describes in a first-person narrative his childhood up to the early years of his career as a journalist and his departure from University College Dublin in the late 1960s. Related with a Rabelaisian verve, A Single Headstrong Heart is a prequel to Myers’ bestselling Watching the Door, set in Belfast at the height of the Troubles during the 1970s, and it has all the panache and particularity of that masterly book. As they grow up in Leicestershire, England, with regular holiday visits to Ireland, Kevin and his twin sister Maggie are sheltered by a mother’s domestic diligence and survive a father’s eccentricity and gradual disintegration. Being Irish and Catholic in an English provincial town brings fascinating tensions and analysis to bear on boarding school experiences, social status, sport and a burgeoning sexuality. The travails of puberty have rarely been so candidly depicted. Pop music, political awareness and modernity break in with the advent of the Sixties and modernity as this rare, ebullient personality undergoes social and political transformation. With a sometimes grotesque humour reminiscent of Roald Dahl, these recollections retain an authentic childlike sense of galloping self-importance in an adult re-casting. Broadly chronological, the main narrative arc is sustained by the author’s relationship with his father, with a startling denouement revealed after his father’s death that lends context to these vivid memories.
