"Kathy Burke's mother, Bridget, died of stomach cancer when she was 18 months old; she writes that it made her feel dead famous in her community. She was raised by her older brothers, John and Barry, who were 10 and eight when it happened, and sometimes by their father Pat, an alcoholic for many years, violent with it, who struggled to care for his family."
"The entertainment industry is top-heavy with people from middle-and upper-class backgrounds who have a limited understanding of lives that don't resemble their own. In my experience, one of the misconceptions they have about working-class life is that it is all grey skies and kitchensink misery. Burke's memoir has its painful moments, but the joy radiating from it is palpable and invigorating."
Kathy Burke lost her mother to stomach cancer at 18 months and was raised by older brothers and intermittently by a violent, alcoholic father. Pat and Bridget moved from Ireland and the family lived on an Islington estate where neighbours shared childcare and food. On his deathbed in 1994 Pat asked her to quit smoking and to pursue her creative ambitions. Childhood moments mix pain with abundant kindness and comic resilience, such as turning a cruel insult by an ice-cream-van stranger into a joke and a dance. Teenage years in the 1970s and 1980s were charged with punk energy and possibility.
#childhood-bereavement #working-class-community #humour-and-resilience #class-barriers-in-entertainment
Read at www.theguardian.com
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