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A funny, tender, and vividly rendered memoir of the author’s boyhood in 1960s Dublin. Irish theater director Sheridan spent his youth in a house teeming with siblings and miscellaneous lodgers. Like Angela’s Ashes, this is a memoir about a family’s muddling through, of a boy’s learning to laugh in order to keep from crying. Though less squalid than McCourt’s Limerick, Sheridan’s Dublin is a quirky, colorful place. His dad is a hilariously indefatigable Mr. Fix-it, vanquished repeatedly by a malfunctioning TV set and a diabolically possessed washing machine. Never have the frustrations of home repair been so delightfully chronicled. Here’s Sheridan on the family’s maniacal washing machine: “Every time [ma] turned it on, it leaked. When one source was plugged, it found somewhere else to leak from. . .We were living permanently in Wellington boots. If things continued, a raft was next.” As in most Irish memoirs about childhood, Sheridan’s school is a repressive prison run by bullying, sometimes pedophile priests. Sheridan and his friend Andy form a bad garage band, listen to Beatles records, and smoke pot. Andy’s older sister becomes the object of Sheridan’s painful first love, the target of his hopelessly ineffective romantic advances. Sheridan sneaks into a Swedish movie about birth and the female anatomy. Mouth agape, he emerges from the theater a wiser man: “Now life was awash with new concepts . . . with uterus, cervix, and placenta, words that sounded like planets from the outer reaches of the solar system.” Tragedy arrives when the author’s younger brother dies after brain surgery. Looking at his devastated parents, Sheridan has an epiphany: “Maybe that’s all there was—procreation and death. You live on in your children, but you die.” At 17, Sheridan finds the love of his life: the theater. Acting becomes his way of understanding himself and the world around him. A thoroughly enjoyable, comic journey back in time; Sheridan has brilliantly re-created his delightful, poignant boyhood. (Author tour)