From this mosaic of memory a self-portrait emerges that takes its author, a child of Hitler's war, from his upbringing in Callan to the threshold of his career as one of Ireland's most distinguished playwrights. The frontier town of Callan was a crucible of Ireland's War of Independence. Thomas Kilroy's pro-Treaty father – a police sergeant who found solace in greyhounds and gambling – and his anti-Treaty mother were emblems of divided loyalty in a newly independent country. According to Thomas Kilroy, one of Ireland's most distinguished living playwrights, his captivating memoir materialized in response to a cataract operation in 2006, shocking his memory into being and imparting him with a uniquely tactile and sensuous perception of his own past. Over the Backyard Wall describes a coming of age embodied by escape, self-discovery and a struggle to contend with the rigid culture of a small Irish town in Co. Kilkenny during WWII, with parents representing both sides of the civil war conflict of the 1920s. He describes encounters with fellow Kilkenny artists Tony O'Malley and Hubert Butler, and writers such as Flannery O'Connor during his tour of the southern US states in the 1950s. In keeping with Kilroy's previous works, Over the Backyard Wall utilizes the silences of the past to liberate the imagination, making use of social and political history to reinvigorate the shard-like nature of his own narrative memory.
"Kilroy is nothing if not unrelentingly honest in his work and in his person. He doesn't boast about this in the book, but it emphasises the deep quality of his observations, in which the eye is a vital element."
The Independent
"Written in an affable tone and straightforward style, Over the Backyard Wall will perhaps strike many readers as a thoroughly agreeable account of the early life and times of arguably the least well-known of that generation of Irish playwrights."
