That book it has me - The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry. It's dynamite.
sharing a good story. can i do this? sharing. borrow it. buy it.
cheerio.

"My father's happiness. It was a precious gift in itself, as perhaps
my mother's anxiety was a perpetual spanner thrown
into her works. For my mother never made miniature legends
of her life, and was singularly without stories, though I am sure
there were things there to tell as good as my father's.

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes
that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more
likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following
them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing
entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad
black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling
after and a question mark.

My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove
him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, like a second
more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul.

Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot
a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long
reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is
indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man
we might be continuously happy in it."