Andrea says how love survives death and loss
Early last Sunday morning I was driving along a leafy, deserted road in D4 when a beautiful, mystical-looking woman, all in black, with her raven hair tied up, flashed by on a scooter. Like Jane Eyre on wheels. Like Garbo giving it welly at 10mph.
“That was me!” Andrea Corr said at the launch of her book Barefoot
Pilgrimage on Thursday night at Bestseller on Dawson Street. I hadn’t seen her in a few years. I remembered Andrea from gigs and nights out with The Corrs in the late 1990s in places like New York, London and Miami.
On Thursday we talked briefly about loss, babies, children. I showed her a video of my baby son dancing and she laughed. Andrea signed a copy of the book for my wife and said she must be a saint.
Looking not unlike a saint herself later in her speech to launch her breathtaking memoir about grief and love and hope, Andrea started with a joke. Adjusting the microphone, she said: “I’ll just move this down a bit because contrary to popular belief, I’m actually not that tall!”
“I didn’t intend to make a speech,” she began. “I didn’t intend to write a book. The more distance that came between our home family life and where I was in my life, the more I realised it was remarkable.”
(Husband Brett Desmond and dad Dermot were among the intimate gathering, along with siblings Jim and Caroline, plus Andrea’s manager John Hughes and Guggi.)
“It really wasn’t for anybody else to read. It was to confirm that that happened in a way, and that love was there, but then in doing so, so much more came than I could have dreamed of. And in lots of ways, as I say at the beginning of the book, I don’t really think this was me in a way that did it. I think I was prompted from beyond.”
Referring to her mother Jean, who died on November 24, 1999, in a hospital in Newcastle-uponTyne, tragically young at the age of 57, from a rare lung condition, Andrea said: “The most remarkable thing to me was that Mum came alive after all those years through… through just stirring the fire of the memories. She came.
“I did not feel good before I wrote it. I felt deeply sad. And as much as I sound weepy right now, I feel really happy since I have [written the book].
“And I have more faith than I ever had before in love surviving death and loss.”