Writing the Closing Pages of an Irish Memoir

The last chapter of a travelogue is rarely the longest, yet it carries the heaviest cargo. For An Irish Experience, the final pages became a quiet reckoning with the country I had spent years circling, a place that felt familiar and foreign in equal measure. I started drafting what would become the closing chapter in longhand, the way I begin most things, and finished the last paragraph on a keyboard that hummed beside an open window.

Howard G. Franklin had published novels and shorter work before turning to memoir. Gideon's Children had taken him through the American South, into questions of justice and inheritance. Ireland, by contrast, drew him toward something softer. The memoir-travelogue collected years of trips, family stories, and long walks along boreens in Galway and Kerry, and closing it meant deciding which threads to leave hanging and which to weave into a final knot.

The challenge of a final chapter is structural. A travelogue wanders by nature, but a conclusion must give the reader a sense of arrival. I wanted the ending to feel less like a farewell and more like a glance backward from a train window, when the carriage lurches forward and the landscape compresses into a single held image. That image, when it finally arrived, came from a memory I had not expected to use at all.

The most difficult sentence in the chapter was the first. Once I had the opening line, the rest arrived with a momentum that surprised me, though not as much as the tears that followed. A finished book, I learned that spring, is its own small grief and its own quiet liberation. The desk was littered with tissues for an hour afterward, and the gulls outside sounded exactly like they did in Connemara.

Finding the Setting for the Final Chapter

I wrote the first full draft of the closing chapter in a rented flat in St Kilda, listening to the tram rattle past on The Esplanade and the gulls argue over chips. Melbourne had become a way station between trips, a place to sit still long enough for sentences to settle. The winter light there reminded me of certain mornings in Dingle, that thin grey wash that flattens the Atlantic into a sheet of pewter and makes every colour on the street look slightly stained.

The season suited the work. I kept the heater off and wore a jumper knitted by a friend in Hobart, the kind of rough wool that smells faintly of damp eucalyptus and woodsmoke. My desk faced a blank wall, deliberately, so the only distraction was the interior weather of the book. Outside, footy was starting again, and I could hear the distant thump of a match on the oval below, voices carrying through the cold like they always do in Melbourne suburbia.

There is a particular pleasure in finishing a book far from its subject. Ireland was still vivid in my mind, but distance gave me permission to be honest in ways proximity had not. The chapter needed candour, not sentiment, and candour often arrives best when the writer is slightly displaced. I was an American writing about Ireland while living in Australia, and that double remove sharpened the prose in ways I could not have engineered on the ground.

Memory, Invention, and the Discipline of Memoir

Memoir is a contract with the reader that says: this happened, more or less, and this is what it meant. The final chapter tested that contract in ways the earlier chapters had not, because the closing pages ask the reader to trust the entire book. I had to decide what to keep and what to simplify, knowing full well that family members would read these pages and measure them against their own recollections of long-ago Christmases and ferry crossings and shouted conversations across kitchens.

I kept a folder of loose pages beside the manuscript: receipts from pubs in Doolin, the back of a postcard from Skellig Michael, a phone number scrawled in pencil by a cousin in Cork. These fragments were not a script, but they were a kind of compass. When a passage felt invented, I would read one of the fragments aloud and let the actual rhythm of the moment pull me back into the scene.

The discipline of memoir, I came to think over those months, sits closer to reportage than to fiction. You earn the story by remembering it accurately, and you earn the reader by admitting when the memory softens at the edges. The last chapter required more admissions than I had expected. There are sentences in the published version that begin, in effect, with an apology, and I do not think they are weaker for it.

Why the Book Ends Where It Does

Many readers expect a travelogue to end at the airport, or on the plane home, or in the first week of being back. An Irish Experience ends instead at a wake in a parish hall outside Ennis, where the rain drummed on the roof and someone played a slow air on a fiddle while others passed around a plate of ham sandwiches and shop-bought cake. I chose the wake because it gave me permission to think about Ireland as a country that loses people, and not merely as a landscape that welcomes strangers.

The decision to end there was practical as much as emotional. A wake gathers everyone in one room, including the dead, and a writer can use that compression. It allowed me to revisit characters who had appeared earlier in the book, briefly, and to give them a final exchange that the wandering structure of the earlier pages could not. It also let the prose breathe into something closer to prayer than to report.

Some of my American readers wanted a brighter ending. Some of my Australian readers, writing to me from Sydney and Perth, asked for more practical guidance about retracing the routes in the book. I owed them honesty more than comfort. The wake gave me a container for that honesty without forcing me to manufacture a resolution I did not feel. A country is not a postcard, and a good ending honours what the country actually asks of you.

The Actual Writing Process

I am a slow drafter and a fast reviser. The first draft of the last chapter took six weeks, mostly because I kept avoiding the sentences that mattered most. The second draft took ten days. The third draft was written in a single sitting on a transatlantic flight from Brisbane to Los Angeles, with the woman beside me politely ignoring the pages filling with tears, and the man on the other side asking, very quietly, if I would like a glass of water.

I worked with an editor in Dublin who pushed me to cut two of the chapter's three epigraphs and to trust the final paragraph to carry more weight than I had given it. She was right, as editors usually are when they refuse to flatter you. I rewrote that final paragraph seventeen times, and I am still not entirely sure the eighteenth version is the right one. Nor will I ever know, which is perhaps exactly how it should be.

The breakthrough came in a small café in Fitzroy, of all unpromising places, watching a barista steam milk with the kind of attention I wanted to bring to my own sentences. I went home and wrote the closing section in one go, then walked down to the Yarra and stood for a long time looking at the water. The book, at that moment, was done enough that I could let it rest, and I drove to Sydney the next day to remind myself that other cities also have harbours.

Notes on Writing the End of a Memoir

A few things helped me finish the last chapter of An Irish Experience, and they may help anyone closing a memoir that has taken longer to write than expected.

• Read the chapter aloud in a room where you cannot whisper. The ear catches lies the eye tolerates, and the final chapter has no room for either.
• Pick an ending place before you pick an ending image. The location will shape the tone more than any single sentence you have not yet written.
• Keep the receipts, the ticket stubs, the unsent letters. They will not write the chapter for you, but they will keep you honest when the temptation to embroider arrives.
• Let someone you trust read the first draft and mark only what bores them. Boredom in a final chapter is fatal to the book behind it.
• Write the final paragraph early, then protect it from premature revision. It is the hinge of the whole book, and hinges need to be set before the door swings.
• When the book feels done, give it one more month before sending it out. Grief and finish wear the same face for a while, and it helps to know which one you are wearing.

The memoir is available now through booksellers in Australia and abroad, and readers who want to follow the journey further can explore his official website for excerpts, reviews, and notes on the wider work. Pick up the book when you have a quiet afternoon, somewhere between Melbourne and the Skellig coast. Ireland waits, and so does a good wake.