EVERY INCH OF HER

Irish theater director and first-novelist Sheridan takes us through the back streets of Dublin to meet Philo Nolan, perhaps the biggest Earth Mother to cross the Liffey since Molly Bloom.

Philomena Nolan is not one to go through life sitting down. Loud, vulgar, obese, and opinionated, she’s heading into middle age—with five children and a husband in tow—but doesn’t intend to let go of immaturity without a fight. Thoroughly fed up with family life, Philo runs away from home one day and takes refuge in a convent. For many of the good sisters, Philo (who couldn’t tell you the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Circumcision) is a breath of fresh air, but even her strongest admirers know that she could never make it as a nun—even if she were single. But they give her a job all the same, putting her to work in the kitchen of an old-age center they run nearby. There, when she isn’t eating everyone’s breakfast before hours, Philo manages to endear herself to the residents and make herself useful in small ways, organizing blind-date contests among the neighborhood pensioners and keeping everyone’s spirits up generally. One of the ladies she befriends is Dina Sugrue, an elderly greengrocer who is partially lame after a case of frostbite. Philo helps Dina run her shop and encourages her to reunite with an old flame who broke her heart many years before. In the meantime, Philo has to fight off the advances of her loutish husband Tommo while challenging his claim to custody of the children and resisting the sisters’ advice to return to him. Can an overweight, undersexed, unfit mother of five find happiness in a convent? Maybe Philo wants something else.

A mildly transgressive version of Brendan O’Caroll’s Agnes Brown novels, with the same sentimentality and forced good spirits that made many readers of those works rather queasy in short order.