Writing Home: An Evening with Polly Devlin

Polly Devlin’s Writing Home reads like a loosely structured memoir, consisting of pieces spanning Devlin’s extraordinarily varied life and career—the name-only index is like a who’s who of twentieth-century popular culture.

As Joan Bakewell notes in her introduction, Writing Home is ‘a totally surprising array of occasions and insights overflowing with Devlin’s wit and love of language’.

Polly Devlin was born and reared in Ardboe, Co. Tyrone. Winning a competition in Vogue led to a job in the magazine’s London offices and then New York, interviewing the most celebrated artists of the 1960s; not only, as she archly claims, ‘the ones I wanted to sleep with’. There are incisive portraits of figures such as Jean Rhys, Diana Vreeland and Yoko Ono. Following marriage, she found herself moving to deepest Gloucestershire with her husband and three adored daughters.

Underpinning the collection are themes of endurance and of love. ‘All my life I have been restless, seeking somewhere else about to be, moving from place to place. But I embrace life and joy and love – I must, otherwise the perpetrator is forever the victor. You can’t undo damage, but you can assuage it. As ever, I go back to poetry. … Seamus Heaney’s wisdom – “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life” – has supplied me with courage and hope and order.’ This book is a delight.

Anne Flaherty is a journalist born in London and growing up in County Clare, Anne has worked for The Irish Press in Dublin and The Irish Times in Belfast as well as reporting from Africa and Asia. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and holds an MA in Anglo-Irish Writing from Queen’s University Belfast.