This Interim Time

 

How do we live when our loved ones are dying? How do we make sense of the world in their wake? And how do we balance love in the present with memory of the past?

As she witnesses her mother’s descent into dementia and a beloved friend’s cruel battle with cancer, Oona Frawley reconsiders the death of her father in New York decades earlier, the loss of her parents' home in Ireland before she was born, and the births of her own children. Balancing between grief at the passing of those closest to her, and joy at the emergence of new life, Frawley has wrought a stunning meditation on memory, family and the brief windows of life we share with those we love.

Utterly humane, fearlessly honest and always, at its core, hopeful, This Interim Time is a powerful, moving work at once intensely personal and entirely universal.

'An exquisitely observed meditation on grief that leaves us at a place of wonder.'

-- Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song
'A gorgeous dispatch on origins and rootedness, on what we lose and gain as we move through this world. It is rare to read a thing so true, that shows you its beating heart word by word.'  -- Sue Rainsford, author of Redder Days

'A moving collection about parents and parenting, about friendship and togetherness, about how we are brought together by loss - and, most of all, about our shared need for understanding through love. Beautiful and lyrical, this book will keep you company in both bright and dark times. For anyone who loved Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, this book is for you.' 

-- Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self

'A beautifully-paced unravelling of family time that patiently untangles the snags of births and deaths. A performance of memory as a recursive eulogy that questions itself: how can words wrap vulnerable bodies; how can they stretch around the unworded mysteries of life, of what happens after and before?'

-- Joanna Walsh, author of Amateurs! and Girl Online

'This Interim Time is beautiful both in its intention and in its execution. A book made luminous by hurt, graced by insight and love. Michael Ondaatje's words the heart is an organ of fire run through it. A haunting and brilliant collection.' 

-- Eoin McNamee, author of The Bureau

'There is so much beauty in this collection of love, grief, and of the attempt to make sense of experience: that beauty is sharp and sometimes breathtaking, but it is also generous and full of compassion, and it runs rich with an intelligence and attention to crystalline detail that is enough, frequently, to make the reader stop, and understand something about their own life, and understand something about life itself. Which is to say that this book, this braid of beauty and wisdom, is a gift.'

-- Belinda McKeon, author of Tender

'Fragmentary yet fully realised, heart-breaking yet restorative, This Interim Time is a stunning literary achievement and an exquisite meditation on love - and its ultimate expression, grief.'

-- Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

Oona Frawley was born in New York in 1972 to Irish parents and spent part of each year in Ireland as a child. She received a doctorate in Irish literature from the Graduate School and University Center in New York and has taught at the City University of New York, University College Dublin, Queen’s University, Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. She currently lectures at the Irish National University, Maynooth. She has published five books, including first novel, Flight, which was published in 2014 by Tramp Press. She lives in Wicklow with her family. 

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