My Mother Wore A Yellow Dress: An Irish Childhood in the 1960s (non-fiction) by Christina McKenna

"This is the story of my journey out of a lonely childhood into the dissonant world of the adult.  It's about the mother who cared for me and tried to smooth the way, and the father who couldn't, who charged on ahead regardless, letting the briars and branches of his discontent crash into me, to cause me to stumble, to defeat me and make me bleed." (Prologue)

Paperback:  Christina McKenna's stunning memoir is a tale of two generations of Irish women.

Sparkling with wit and compassion, My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress tells the story of a mother and daughter, one bound by the constrictions of 1960s Ireland, the other struggling desperately to escape both it and the heartless father who has blighted her life.

But escape does come, and in the most macabre way:  a prolonged haunting confirms for Christina the reality of the spirit world, freeing her imagination from the dysfunctional dance of her mother and father, her twisted headmaster, her unyielding uncles scrounging for land and the hoard of ancestral money.

Passionate and beautifully told, My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (2004) is the redemptive postscript to over a decade of Irish childhood memoirs, concluding that our past, no matter how painful, need not keep us bound.  The choice is between hate and love.  And the right choice, suggests the author, will set us free.

About the author:  Christina McKenna was born and brought up in County Derry.  Educated at Belfast College of Art and University of Ulster, she left Northern Ireland in 1985 to teach abroad.  Over the years she has had exhibitions of her work in Ireland, Spain, Turkey, Italy and Mexico.  She currently resides in Rostrevor, County Down.