Hilary Fannin: Behind the Venetian blinds

'I was kind of scared of the word 'memoir'," says Hilary Fannin, whose memoir – Hopscotch – is published this week. "But then somebody said to me, 'It's not like autobiography, where you're writing a big factual story. With memoir you can write about a bunch of years in your life – or somebody who meant a lot to your life.' That was the key. When I realised that, I could focus on a particular time in my own childhood."

Hopscotch opens with Fannin in Low Babies with her four-year-old peers at school in Howth, learning to sing There's a Hole in My Bucket, and worrying about not being able to purl, and whether God can see her in the toilet.

Young Hilary, it turns out, has other things to worry about too. There are her three much older siblings, who wear bellbottom jeans and listen to The Beatles and, she muses, may or may not be related to her. There’s her mother, who sings Judy Collins as she fries the eggs for breakfast, and applies lipstick even when she’s only going to the butcher’s. There’s her father, who can never find his ruddy chequebook. And then there’s the tall lady with the soft blond hair.

Hopscotch, like Fannin's weekly column in this newspaper, Fiftysomething, is marked by irreverent wit and pin-sharp observation. It's full of period detail; school lunches that would now be regarded as toxic (jam sandwiches and MiWadi), the agony aunt Angela McNamara ranting about something called "venereal disease", Avon ladies and knickerbocker glories.

But the book, written in the voice of her younger self – she was known to her family as “Billy” – reveals another side of Fannin as she delves deep into the mystery and magic of childhood memories. It also reveals the sort of intimate details that many families would prefer to keep under lock and key, not least her father’s long-running extra-marital affair and, eventually, a financial collapse which led to the repossession of the family home.

Did Fannin worry that the members of her immediate family might take offence? “No, not at all,” she says. “I kind of knew that they wouldn’t. The stuff that I write about has always been awake in the family. It has always been known about and talked about. We weren’t the kind of people to brush things under the carpet – although at times you bloody wished that somebody would.”

Robert Fannin snr died 15 years ago. Nevertheless Fannin's publisher, Doubleday Ireland, insisted that her mother and sisters must read Hopscotch before it could go to print. "All our realities are slightly different – I mean, you interpret your past in different ways. The one person I was worried about was my mother. She's 88 now. My brother gave her the book and said, 'Read it.' I was upstairs writing the epilogue and thinking, 'Oh, God almighty.' But she was fantastic about it. She really loved the writing. But she was also completely fine with the story."

As for her sisters, Fannin says, when they read the book they had some revelations for her, too. In the book, for example, she describes the death of their pet budgie, Lucky. “I came down one morning and he was lying in the cage, dead. That’s what happened as far as I was concerned.

“But in fact, the night before the budgie had got caught up in these dreadful polyester – polystyrene, nearly – curtains we had in the kitchen. They were rock hard and had bits of thread coming out of them, and the bird had gotten out of the cage and strangled itself on the curtains. My sisters unknotted the bits of thread and put it back in the cage, lying down, so that I wouldn’t realise it had died in such a horrific way.”

Why, if there's no animosity to Hopscotch from within the family, does she refer to her siblings under different names throughout? "It was easy to write about 'Billy' because Billy was at a distance," she explains. "But when I started to write about my sisters and my brother, I was too caught into the present.

“Laura’s name is Laura Louise and Valerie is Valerie Anne. My brother’s middle name is John. I called them Louise, Anna and John in the book because I needed to place them in the moment that I was writing about.”

The tone of the book is affectionate and elegiac. Yet Fannin says she was “pretty callous” when she was writing it. What does she mean by that? “I didn’t feel like editing myself,” she says. “But I didn’t want to be malevolent or cruel, and I don’t think I was. It’s a recognition of all of our lives, but it’s not cruel. There was no intentional cruelty in the family anyway. Shit happened, but…” She shrugs. “My mother was 45 years old when the bailiffs came, the house fell apart, the affair was revealed and all of that. I’m 53 now. I look at the kinds of choices that she had – and I know that I would have had to be incarcerated with frustration if I had been her.

“She meets my father when she’s in her early twenties. They meet in art college. He’s very good-looking, a very dynamic kind of character. She’s very beautiful, very vivacious. They fall in love. They want to sleep with one another. They should have had an affair for about four months, then said a very straightforward goodbye and moved on. As you have done, I’m sure, in your life – as I have done in my life. As most of us expect to be able to do. But as she said, if you wanted to sleep with somebody you had to bloody marry them. And then once you were married to them there was no way out.”

Looking back, she says, her parents found it hard to swallow what society was offering them.

“Bob felt if he had money things would change, and Marie felt that if she had freedom things would change. I don’t know how much would have changed, ultimately. It was before Dr Spock. Nobody was saying, ‘Here, sit down on the couch and talk to me about this.’”

Fannin insists that her family’s story, while singular, is not that unusual. “Behind the Venetian blinds there was suburb after suburb full of mayhem. What is anyone writing about? What’s Anne Enright writing about? What’s Roddy Doyle writing about? There was this facade, and it was maintained. At least for us there was an open-ness, which made all the difference.” She nods, thoughtfully. “It made all the difference.”

Hopscotch is published by Doubleday Ireland at €12.99