Author(s): Kevin Ireland

NZ Biography

As he enters his 90th year on the planet, Kevin Ireland describes his third memoir as a process of "sweeping up all the reflective wrappers and the tinsel, and describing how, in the setting sun, they glitter with the brilliant romance of nostalgia."
Unlike his earlier two memoirs, one of which won a National Book Award, this is not a systematic chronicle of lasting interests and colourful occurrences, but a reflective, almost absent-minded, rummaging through 30 episodes – representing a month – at the back of his brain. The method is open and experimental, and it allows the ordinary and everyday to take a rightful place among the souvenirs of his ‘life’.
Matters that once seemed significant are relegated to obscurity and events and intersections that were once thought to be minor are now allowed space to reveal how they stealthily altered viewpoints and added to a store of vital experiences. In his 90th year Ireland no longer believes that the highpoints of an existence are always decided by important events. Some of them do have lasting results, but this memoir deliberately sets out to uncover the enduring worth and power of happenings that may have seemed simple at the time but were complex and entirely out of the ordinary in their effects. Overlooked memories return to us in our old age with a new and astonishing energy and with all the buzz of their magic reborn.