It must have been clear, as John Broderick wrote his first novel, The Pilgrimage, that it would be banned by the Irish censorship board. (This was almost a badge of honor at the time for Irish writers. Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy was banned in 1958, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls in 1960 and John McGahern’s The Dark in 1965, joining books by Balzac, Hemingway, H. G. Wells, and many others until the law was reformed in 1967.) His 1961 exploration of religiosity and sexuality is fearless and frank and sometimes comic. In the opening chapter, we hear the devout Glynn family—husband Michael, wife Julia, nephew Jim—conclude their plans for a pilgrimage to Lourdes. In the last paragraphs of the chapter, the visiting priest, chief promoter of the trip, “loosened the cord of his habit, and belched.” And then: “He belched again and then made the sign of the cross hazily in the air.” Soon afterward, Julia Glynn, in the guise of the faithless wife, goes to her bedroom “where her nephew was already waiting for her.”
My wife came in from work to find a funereal hush. ‘Hello?’ she said tentatively, perhaps thinking her entire family had been abducted or, worse, were attempting an insipid practical joke at her expense. My wife doesn’t care for surprises. For years, she’s made it very clear that if I ever threw her a surprise birthday party, she would simply scream, exit the building, and our next communication would be via the law firm managing our divorce.
‘We’re in here’ I said, eventually, in a tone that suggested things were not going well. As she entered the kitchen, she found us at the dinner table, me glowering and our daughter in tears. Our son immediately leapt from his seat to hug her, and was soon sobbing into her dress.
As anyone who knows clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will tell you, there are no specific days of the year for sadness. It can be the brightest day, in the loveliest place, and you still feel like your mind is trapped in permafrost.
But Blue Monday did prompt me to reflect on happiness. What is it anyway? What does it mean in my life?
Something of a departure from previous offerings, Data Mind is an ambitious poet’s concept album, a book-length unified field of prose poems that takes the internet as its muse: “I open my laptop and hear a million voices speaking to me at once” (from, “If a Menopausal Woman Dances in the Jungle and Nobody Films It”). Fuhrman distills complex ideas and attitudes into quick bursts of lyrical observations on our addictive digital world. Her short, dense blocks of lush language are tightly controlled and highly compressed, yet somehow Fuhrman manages to make her brief barbs feel deep as an oil well.