Byline: Gerry McCarthy

Fiction and therapy do not always happily go together, writes GERRY McCARTHY

Turning the troubled past into a narrative is often the first step towards health.

Freud's talking cure, and the legion of similar therapies that followed it, posited the now familiar idea of the therapist as listener, lending an ear while the patient probes their memories.

Similar claims are sometimes made at a broader social level. Whole nations are deemed to be suffering a kind of metaphorical child abuse or post-traumatic stress. The Irish, it is sometimes argued, still suffer from the aftereffects of famine in the 1840s. The national psyche, if such a thing exists, bears the scars of past trauma in much the way that an individual person does.

More cogent -because it is more recent and requires no mysterious mode of transmission across the generations -is the fallout from the 1940s and 1950s, when the Catholic Church presided over a repressive system of social norms. We are only now hearing the stories of children brutalised in industrial schools and young women enslaved in Magdalene laundries. The survivors are still among us: telling their stories is both a personal validation and a therapeutic act for society at large.

Films such as The Magdalene Sisters and Song for a Raggy Boy have turned these stories into fictional narratives. Writers such as Gerard Mannix Flynn, in his play James X, offer thinly fictionalised accounts of their own experiences.

Christine Dwyer Hickey's fourth novel, Tatty, though set within a dysfunctional family rather than an abusive institution, belongs to this genre of Irish fiction as therapy.

It centres on a young girl growing up in the Dublin of the 1960s and 1970s. She comes from a relatively prosperous background, with a larger-than-life father who regularly flies abroad to race meetings. Young Caroline is nicknamed Tatty by her family because of her habit of telling tales. Through her eyes we come to see the depth of dysfunction in her family: alcoholic parents who fight constantly,...