the Dublin Review

In the spring issue of the Dublin Review, Cathy Sweeney writes about the strange season in her life that followed a brief break in her sobriety. ‘The only desire I had was to be alone,’ she writes – and so she moved out of the apartment she shared with her partner and rented a place in a town an hour’s drive away. In this gripping essay, Sweeney takes a hard look at her own past – including the costs of her drinking, and her mixed experience of recovery meetings, which could be a particularly difficult place for women. And she brilliantly evokes the mental atmospheres of her post-relapse interlude.

Also in the spring issue, Philip Ó Ceallaigh reports on a visit to Moldova during crucial elections late last year. Long resident in Romania, Ó Ceallaigh writes that Moldova ‘affects me like a mild recreational drug’, and ‘Pizdyets’ is both an atmospheric portrait of a country and a report on a key front in Russia’s attempt to expand its influence and undermine democracy.

Neil Hegarty’s ‘Tidal Bore’ builds a portrait of Hegarty’s father, a distinguished Catholic architect in Derry during the Troubles, through a series near-death experiences and then the final, dementia-clouded phase of his life. Narrating a series of outings with his father, Hegarty produces a vivid portrait not only of this man but of the history and psychogeography of Derry and its hinterlands.

The spring Dublin Review also features Georgina Parfitt’s ‘Three Essays on Sitting Still’, a personal essay about life-modelling that spins out into brilliant reflections on the body, boundaries, and attention; Thomas McMullan’s ‘The Empty Castle’, in which a weightlifter narrates his own physical and emotional transfiguration; and Ian Sansom’s diary: another year in the life of a singularly brilliant chronicler of the strangeness of daily life.