MEET THE AUTHOR

DARRAN ANDERSON explores his boyhood in Derry during the Troubles and the history of his family in the memoir Inventory

What inspired you to write this book?

I became a father a few years ago, and when that happens you start reflecting on your own parents. I wanted to give my son that connection to the past, and tell him who his ancestors were. But in doing that I realised that I didn’t really know who I was, so it’s been this kind of revelatory experience. It’s painful in some ways, but it’s very intriguing in other ways.

Did you experience any revelations?

One of the things was the complexity of family history and the wider society. I was brought up with a deep sense of Irishness and Catholicism and all the usual tropes of an Irish writer, but when I started digging I realised that the actual historical record is much more complicated and contradictory in lots of ways. I’d always had a knowledge that my paternal grandfather was in the British Army and then my father and his family had stood up against the British Army during the Troubles, but I realised that the Irish Republican background I had was quite shallow. All of my great grandfathers were in the British Army. The idea of history being far more complex than we know and identity being far more of a shifting, pluralistic thing emerged as I got further and further into it. There’s a line in one of James Joyce’s books where a character says “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, and I got the feeling writing Inventory that we don’t actually know our history very well. We have these stories about the past but when you actually dig into the events that happened, the stories often turn out to be subjective memories or convenient political rewritings of history. There were lots and lots of contradictions. Lots of paradoxes came to light. I gradually came to terms with them, and realised that having multiple identities or contradictions in your history is nothing to be afraid of.

Are you optimistic about Northern Ireland?

I have a healthy pessimism, or rather a healthy scepticism. I see very worrying things when I come home to Derry. There’s a lot of terrible poverty. The Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci talked about having pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. I think I have those two things simultaneously. I want there to be a better world and I can see how we might get there, and there’s a lot of people thankfully working towards that. But I keep this pessimism, because we’re safer that way.