A Very Strange Man: A Memoir of Aidan Higgins
Alannah Hopkin
This is a love story, set in the Irish literary world between 1986 and 2015. When they were first introduced by the poet Derek Mahon, Alannah Hopkin was an arts journalist turned full-time writer and Aidan Higgins, twenty-three years her senior, was a literary stylist, often cited as the heir to Ireland’s great Modernist tradition. They wrote steadily during their twenty-nine years together, but their careers could not have been more different: while Aidan focused on fiction and memoirs, Alannah prioritised work that paid the bills. This gave Aidan the most stable and productive years of his life. But as his eyesight failed and his memory began to fade, Alannah became his carer and had to fight to keep her own writing career alive.
Drawing from diaries and notebooks, and correspondence with writers such as Samuel Beckett, Alice Munro and Harold Pinter, this is a unique record of a major Irish writer. From the joyful honeymoon years – filled with launches, festivals and visits to their Kinsale home by Richard Ford, Edna O’Brien and other literary legends – to the increasingly difficult years of Aidan’s decline, Hopkin tells their story candidly and without commentary. She shows us how, in spite of all, they remained the best of friends, in love until Aidan’s very last breath.
A Very Strange Man is an exceptional piece of writing, objective and authoritative, personal, honest and moving.
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About Alannah Hopkin
Reviews for A Very Strange Man: A Memoir of Aidan Higgins
Sue Leonard
Books Ireland
a subtle and memorable book ... clear-eyed and candid, but generous too and wise
Colm Tóibín
The Irish Times
Powerful and moving. Above all, this is a book about the emotional challenges of caring for someone with dementia – proving that grief really is the price we pay for love.
Sunday Business Post
Your book of the year? So far, A Very Strange Man, by Alannah Hopkin. This is a strangely consoling memoir, and a very rare thing, being an accurate, candid, and moving book about what it is like to be a writer and to live with a writer. I began it the other morning outside in the sun and finished it some hours later, with a mild sunburn and a sense of great gratitude.
Sebastian Barry
Irish Independent
‘among the richest accounts I’ve ever read of lives devoted to writing.’
Rob Doyle
Irish Times
Hopkin’s straightforward approach suits the biographical record, but her writing comes into its own whenever she exercises her gift for topographical evocation: “Every tiny stone-walled field had a wealth of meadow grasses and wild flowers”
Patricia Craig
The Times Literary Supplement