‘My Mother (at the Time)’ is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, fitting for an installment that marks the one year point since its inception. For this episode, host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy. A brilliant scholar, Healy was born to an unmarried mother and raised in fosterage with multiple families. He impressed his peers at college in 80s Dublin but soon felt alienated enough to start a life of intermittent exile, wandering Europe, mastering German and Dutch, evolving into a scholar of art and rare books. The title of the episode represents the difficulties that affected Healy profoundly at the start of his life: a story about a calamitous piano lesson wherein he accidentally kicked a nun leads him to speak of “my mother at the time”—all told he had several “mothers”, and was taught by the “sisters” (the nuns who were his first guardians) to think of and name each of them as “mother”. The conversation with Healy also provided a chance for him to read from a newly completed work, a Joycean stream-of-unconsciousness memoir written during lockdown. With his famous voice, once deployed to read the unabridged entirety of Finnegan’s Wake over several days, Healy conjured up vocal traces of an Ireland of half a century ago, in both dialogue and performance of his text. Something to cherish, without a doubt. No need to worry about linear logic or storyline, but rather (as with all good readings of the Wake) let the music take you somewhere.

Host: Luke Sheehan

Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

John Field: Nocturne N. 5 in B-Flat Major

Guest Link: https://www.lilliputpress.ie/products/james-joyces-finnegans-wake-a-reading-by-patrick-healy

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Mankind-Tragedy-Five/dp/9492027038