I’ve got a new job coming up with names for Irish memoirs that have yet to be written. It’s a good gig. Everyone loves a memoir and the publishing companies pay top dollar for titles that evoke memory, the past, crumpled bags of Tayto and all that sort of thing. The yanks love it too. You sell shed loads to the yanks if the right title is on the cover. The yanks love to see an evocative title on a memoir’s cover alongside a picture of a depressed seven-year-old in a tattered jumper or a crappy bike leaning against a derelict cottage or the sun setting over Inishbofin. The yanks eat that stuff up.
It’s an easy enough job. I start by getting myself in the zone, mentally placing myself in the past. I do this by drinking flat bottles of TK red lemonade, listening to old tape recordings of Late Date with Val Joyce, and taking Sunday drives out to remote shitholes to attend mass. That kind of thing provides all the inspiration I need and soon I’m frantically writing down the myriad titles flooding into my mind. Then I make a list and bring it to the publishers and they buy the titles they want and then they go and find some people to write the books.
Here are a few new titles that I’m currently pitching to publishers:
Hats and Memories of Hats
Minty Sweets on Sunday
The Rusty Hinge
Tabernacles
Butter in the Pan
The Last Tram to Kingstown
Glenageary Nights (for when Joseph O’Conner finally gets around to it)
Prayers and the Preyed Upon
The Bendy Road
The Bitter Wind
The Bitter Wind on the Bendy Road
Mammy on the Stairs
Daddy was a Blueshirt
Lumpy Porridge
An Auld Flask of Tae
Ham Sandwiches
Busty Cream Pie Co-eds Do Ass 2 Mouth
Good eh? It sounds like you’d get a proper read out of that lot and no mistake. Not much interest in the last one actually which is funny because to me that sounds the most interesting.
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