A Restless Life (review)

The bare prose employed throughout Leland Bardwell's autobiography A Restless Life is as candid as it is beautiful. Bardwell, the unlikely heroine, was born in India in 1922 and raised chiefly in County Kildare. Bardwell's sparse style and a gift for winding a yarn make for a story that sparkles in all of its shabby splendor. Lifting the veil of Victorian silence on the lived Anglo-Irish experience of the twentieth century, Bardwell's memoir travels from colonial India to rural Ireland to hipster London back to urban poverty in Dublin, resting finally in Sligo. It is a story about female identity in twentieth-century Ireland, syncopated with the added complications of an aspiration to write, a compulsion to drink, and the ever-present challenge of motherhood.

Over the course of the memoir, she fends off the prejudices of two nations, England and Ireland, as she undertakes to forge an identity and life of her own. Hers is a tenuous journey, in which a young girl all but shunned by her mother and neglected by a father incapable of oral communication with the youngest of his children,must fend for herself with piecemeal education, clothing, and food, and a family entirely too wrapped up in themselves to remember the last-born child. Bardwell's story compellingly demonstrates the strife between the haves and have-nots within the intimacy of a single family. Always overshadowed by the beautiful older sister Paloma, and by an absent brother, Noll, and born to parents preoccupied with one another, Bardwell's painful recollection of childhood abounds with loneliness and solitude, a prelude that turns into fierce independence and irreverence in later years.

A Restless Life is an intensely feminine book, a record of the lived experience of a young girl, adolescent, woman, and mother. Bardwell's description of an unwanted pregnancy, "the unspeakable loneliness that the young single mother bears" who "vomited in secret" and tried to hide "enlarged breasts and swelling belly" with "corsets and loose dresses" sounds hauntingly familiar decades later. Writing to her father, lying that she cannot come home to Ireland for Christmas because she "had to work in the factory for extra pay" when she actually had three days off spent in lodging, alone, cuts to the core of an almost timeless female conundrum: the situation of being caught between caring for the growth of a yet-unborn human being, and fearing the wrath of those who should most care.

Bardwell's sometimes airless tale cuts deep. There are points when the reader finds it nearly impossible to feel sympathy or even empathy in her recollections of failed relationships, drinking benders, and the struggle to provide for children. But these moments of potential derailing—where the unsettled, tireless trajectory of one misstep after another plunge the narrative into the depths of depression—are where Bardwell's wit and dry sense of humor propel the story forward. "To be a respectable married woman was no easy task for me," Bardwell recounts."I didn't want to be respectable, and I didn't want to be married." Bardwell is unapologetic and uncensored; her tale is most delicious in the devilish winks that sneak out in unexpected moments. Time and again Bardwell falls in love, seeking a settled existence, the prospect of a fantasy coming into being, only to find that it is not what she wanted at all. This memoir is most remarkable in Bardwell's ability to deny even an ounce of self-indulgence or a twinge of regret.

The author seems to relish raw, unadulterated language, which she carefully pieces together to assemble an often cold, uninviting world—but one peppered with darkly humorous interpretations, and sometimes an uncanny ability to deliver a dry punch line. Bardwell's rises and falls are many: one unfortunate job after another in early adulthood; a crippling fear of admitting defeat to her father; but also her achievement of becoming a source of strength to her sister Paloma in later...