O’Reilly grew up the eighth of 11 children in a rambling house on the edge of Derry, Northern Ireland. This memoir recounts his upbringing, marked always by the loss of his mother to cancer when he was five. I have sort of an affinity for orphan stories – my maternal grandmother died when my mother was ten (like O’Reilly’s mother, of breast cancer). While I won’t pretend to know what it’s like to grow up without a mother, I feel like I’ve been a witness to the lifelong grief the loss engenders.

O’Reilly’s story is told with a lot of humor, which leavens the sadness. It’s often broad but very funny. He discusses growing up in an area that was at the center of “the Troubles” in the 1980s, and refers to the INLA – an organization I’m only vaguely aware of – as “the Andrew Ridgeley of Irish republicanism”, which told me all I need to know.

O’Reilly’s siblings are sketched in broad outlines – understandable given their number. His father comes off as an original character, eccentric but loving. My grade for this was a B+.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

Oh my gosh. Who would've thought a memoir of life after a mom of 11 dies would be so hilarious?! I laughed out loud SO many times, and was brought to tears by the last few paragraphs. What a wonderful book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I had not heard of Séamas O'Reilly, an Irish columnist, but had seen several reviews of Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? and thought it would be an interesting book for my non-fiction challenge. I was engaged, laughed a lot and introduced to a very different family than I had ever met before. To begin, he describes his family this way: "Seven would have been considered crisply eccentric, and nine plainly mad. To be one of eleven was singularly demented."

Séamas was only 5 when his mom died and his father was left to raise a family of 11 children. What follows are the adventures and lessons as they learn to cook, clean and run the house. The village they live in tries to help, at least spiritually, and the priest often adds humor to this memoir. All does not go smoothly for this family with near misses while on vacation, an IRA bomb blowing out their windows, and more. I can only imagine the stress this harried father went through as he pulled himself together after the loss of his wife to keep this large family together, teach them to live, love and survive. He certainly has my admiration! This book is full of smiles, laughs and poignant moments. Séamas O'Reilly took tough times and looked at the humor and life in them and penned an engaging and enjoyable memoir that I recommend.

A memoir full of finding the humor in one's grief. Its aura of dysfunctionality makes for deeper intrigue, making the sincere moments of the memoir all the more powerful and effective.

Séamas O'Reilly was the ninth of eleven children, and nearly six-years-old when his mammy died of breast cancer. The author regales us with not only memories of his beloved mum, but of the father who took over raising the wee ones (aged two to seventeen) after the untimely death of his wife.

As the rather offbeat title implies, O'Reilly manages to find the humor in the situation. I laughed aloud many times, as did my husband when I read the bits out loud to him. Here's one we both enjoyed:

". . . there's no greater love than that between a taciturn rural Irishman and the dog he shouts at all day."

This is truly a memoir done right, where the author realizes that his story is not only about him, but all the people in his life who made him what he is. A wonderful, and surprisingly uplifting read. Recommended!

A moving memoir by Séamas O'Reilly that chronicles the shock and grief that impacted each of the members of his family at the death of his mother when he was a little boy. He writes about his classmates' inability to empathize with his loss, the shame he felt over forgetting things about his mother, and his guilt in being unable to experience the same grief as other members of his family.⁠
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Great for readers who question if they've not processed grief the right way, have lost a loved one at an early age, or are helping your own children move through early grief.

This highly unusual memoir was funny and poignant, chronicling the life of a family of eleven children and their dad after their mother died of cancer. It is never maudlin, often hilarious, and always honest.

O'Reilly's Irish Catholic boyhood in Northern Ireland had The Troubles in the background. His father is portrayed with great affection and admiration. O'Reilly was quite young when his mother died and speaks realistically of the aftermath of her death and his own wrestling with his lack of memory of her in later years. It is part very personal biography and partly the story of growing up in what he calls a ridiculously huge Catholic family in the particularly dramatic setting of Derry and Northern Ireland in the 90s.

He relates anecdotes with great humor and self-deprecation. But he also doesn't shy away from the sad reality of his childhood situation. An enjoyable and compelling read. Thanks to the publisher and to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Possibly, if I'd realized sooner that this was non-fiction, I'd have enjoyed it a little more. I kept waiting for a plot that never materialized. Before I requested it from NetGalley, I read that it was hilariously funny. I found no humor in it at all.

I'm giving it four stars, however, because of the excellent writing and the author's impressive vocabulary.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4819625164 I, very likely, will not post my review elsewhere, since it won't, necessarily, motivate readers to buy the book. I do appreciate NetGalley's willingness to let me try it.

I loved this memoir of a motherless boy and his family growing up without their mammy in Ireland. The stories were both funny and touching as well as relatable. An easily accessible book for those who enjoy humorous memoirs.

I both read and listened to this book. I really recommend the audio book version, as it adds a whole other dimension to experiencing this book. You can just feel the love for his family rolling off the pages, by turns funny and heartbreaking, I really loved this memoir.

Seamas O’Reilly is an Irish journalist; as far as I can tell, this is his first book. He was just five years old, one of the youngest of eleven children, when cancer claimed his mother, leaving his father—an extraordinary man, if even half of Seamas tells us is accurate—to raise them all. This is their story. My thanks go to Net Galley; Little, Brown and Company; and Fleet Audio for the review copies. This memoir is for sale now.

Of all the ways in which one can write about the death of a parent, this is one that I never considered. O’Reilly describes his family, his mother’s demise and the impact it has on his family and the community; and the subsequent years of his own and his family members’ lives, and he is hysterically funny. How he manages to achieve this without breaching the boundaries of good taste and respect is nothing short of pure alchemy. Somehow he finds just the right combination of irreverent humor, poignant remembrance, and affection, and it’s pitch perfect.

His finest bits are assigned to his father. I’m giving you just one example, because I want you to experience everything else in context. This isn’t his most amusing anecdote, but it’s a worthy sample of his voice. After heaping praise on him for other things, he tells us:

“He is alarmingly cocky when it comes to his skill at killing mice, a species he hates with a malevolent, blackhearted glee. It’s an odd facet of his character; a man regarded by his friends as one of the kindest, gentlest humans on earth, and by mice as Josef Stalin. He takes particular joy in improvising weapons for the purpose, and has killed rodents with a shoe, a book, and at least one bottle of holy water shaped like the Virgin Mary. He famously dispatched one with a single throw of a portable phone, without even getting out of bed. I know this because he woke us so we could inspect the furry smudge on his bedroom wall…”

I have both the audiobook and the DRC, and rather than alternate between the two, or listening to the audio and then skimming the DRC for quotations and to answer any of my own questions, which is my usual method, I chose to read them both separately, because this story is good enough to read twice, a thing I seldom do these days. Whereas I usually think that having the author read his own audio is ideal, since the author himself knows exactly where to place emphasis and deliver the piece the way it is intended, this time I am ambivalent. O’Reilly speaks faster than any audio reader I’ve yet heard, and he doesn’t vary his pitch much, and as a result, there are some funny bits that I miss the first time through; I am doubly glad to have it in print also. As the audio version progresses, I grow more accustomed to his speaking style, and I miss less than I did at the outset. Nevertheless, if the reader has a choice and doesn’t greatly prefer audiobooks, I recommend print over audio. Ideally, I suggest doing as I did and acquiring both versions.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this will be among the most memorable and enjoyable books published in 2022. Highly recommended.

Beautiful, bitter-sweet tale of a very strange childhood (motherless and with ten siblings) in a very strange place (Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles). I admired the author’s openness and relished his gallows humor. The book reminded me a little of David Sedaris’ essays, but the O’Reillys clan seems much more warm and loving.

The author is a great storyteller (one of my favorite chapters was a tour of all the rooms at his family house) and he describes both his personal memories and political developments from a child’s perspective, to sometimes comical, sometimes heartbreaking effect.

Thanks to the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

I received a free Advanced Reading Copy via NetGalley in exchange for a complete and honest review.
This book was sweet and it really made me smile.

Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up because my sides still ache

First, read this:
<blockquote>Thankfully, he laughs heartily throughout, and his main objections are less of taste or decency and more points of fact he felt I needed hearing. Besides telling me, several more times, to slow down, most of his input cleaves close to the pedantic. Such is the case with my description of the priest who came to bless our 26-foot-long caravan before the 3,200 mile round trip we took to Spain, the year after my mother died. I describe the oddness of the scene, the priest swinging incense around our giant caravan, in full vestments, conducting himself with the stately grace of an altogether more solemn occasion. “He wasn’t in full vestments” Daddy interjects, a hint of mocking laughter in his voice. “He was wearing a <I>sotan</i>” he says, with an incredulity that suggests I’d committed a faux pas equivalent to forgetting my own name.

The fact that I’d misidentified this sotan—an only marginally less formal, long cassock type affair—is sufficient for my father to consider me very badly caught out. He denies outright that he ever killed a mouse with a tiny plastic bottle of holy water in the shape of the virgin Mary, and seems particularly aggrieved that I keep saying he knows every priest in Ireland. This he decries as emblematic of my addiction to overstatement—“Séamas, there should be a disclaimer on every page”—before suggesting a figure like 70-80% would be more realistic.</blockquote>
That's from <a href="https://lithub.com/on-reading-my-memoir-to-my-father/">the LitHub piece</a> about Author Séamas reading parts of his memoir to his blinded-by-diabetes Daddy. Because, in the end, you're not going to thank me for ruining the fun of this read by quoting some parts I highlighted to you. I think you're best going into this read, and I really, really hope you *will* go into this read, without too much explicit information.

You already know the bones, the author's one of eleven children...I need a lie-down every time I think about that...raised by a man alone. Modern sensibilities have it that men can't raise children, and that there's such a thing as overpopulation, and dear goddesses below us why the hell didn't she just kick him out of bed?! But to the devil with all that, dive into the absolutely astonishing O'Reilly family's beautifully bizarre world as remembered by the ninth of the eleven souls born to two people whose love was, I am shocked to say, well attested by all and sundry. Especially their children.

The author being gainfully employed, and even a success at his career, and none of his siblings having gone to prison, well I'd say they did very well, those delightfully out-of-step parents. I'd also say, given Séamas's astonishing capacity for reading, that the whole ecosystem of family was a healthy, if really weird, one. Who else had a Daddy whose response to an IRA bombing that shattered some of their remote house's windows was to be, in a word, unconcerned? Larger implications, political ideas, the safety of his family, all came down to "if I panic and go to pieces there is no hope of ever making all of them feel safe again." And he chose their sense of serenity, of faith that the world would be right, over his probable fears and sleeplessness...but he held no brief with hate, or with unkindness of any sort.

What stands out for me, reading this memoir of a man so much younger than myself and from such a widely divergent background, is how included I felt as I read the anecdotes. I was a guest being given the lay of the land. I was the stranger who, accidentally wandering into the ambit of the family, was welcomed with the greatest possible camaraderie and bonhomie. My drink glass was never empty and the snacks were endless, so my new friends were set to make me one of the neighbors and friends whose bemused orbits are noted and needed without breaking the harmony within.

I am so happy I read this memoir of a five-year-old "half-orphan" and his trip through this one wild and precious life (bless you, Mary Oliver, for that perfect locution) among a family he clearly loves and likes. If I were just slightly more evil, I'd be so jealous of him I'd spoiler all his jokes and tread on his every punchline. But I know when I've been offered a beautiful gift. This is one.

So, Joe O'Reilly...I know you're not going to read my words about your lad Séamas...but you should know that your work, the hard slogging work of being alive when your mate is dead...is the reason we all have a very fine gift in your son. In his gifts, so many that owe their existence and their potency to you.

A glass of cheer to you, sir.

I felt really guilty. I was laughing out loud. Reading a book about the death of a mother and the funeral and how a family of eleven children and a dad coped with life. This stuff should not be FUNNY! But, Seamas O’Reilly’s memoir had me in stitches.

I am not Irish, or Catholic, or from a large family. It doesn’t matter. O’Reilly draws his community and family and their experiences so vividly, I felt like I was. Yes, he pokes at human foibles but the love for his family and community shines through. It’s a gloriously uplifting book.

O’Reilly offers memorable characters through story and quotable descriptions. “I was Seamas of the Dead Mam,” he writes about how he was treated on Mother’s Day after the death of his mother. The family dog Nollaig “was less than a beloved pet than an uncaring brute who tumbled through our lives like a demented fat boy in an American campus comedy.” He writes about the priest’s blessing of the family caravan and the family tour of Europe.

Just thinking about this memoir makes me smile.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Shelf Awareness PRO: "From certain angles, the circumstances of my upbringing are disarmingly baroque," writes Séamas O'Reilly in the opening pages of his memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? O'Reilly's mother died (as the title suggests) when he was just shy of his sixth birthday, leaving him and his 10 siblings to be raised by a single father in the heart of the Troubles. Moreover, their property's fence line corresponded with the demarcation between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, complete with a checkpoint and prone to the "dystopian rigamarole undertaken by everyone who lived on [the border]." (Worse even than the backdrop of the constant bombings of the Troubles, though, was the "nerve-obliterating period between 1999 and 2001, when no less than six of [the O'Reilly] daughters were simultaneously teenagers."

It's hard to imagine a memoir about an author's dead mother could elicit actual belly laughs, but somehow, O'Reilly makes it happen. In the story that lends the memoir its title, a nearly six-year-old O'Reilly skips along and smiles up at every unlikely guest at his mother's wake to ask, charmingly, "Did ye hear Mammy died?" From this story--at once hilarious and heartbreaking--O'Reilly expands to consider his childhood from the distance of adulthood. He recalls with tenderness and care a frantic father occasionally forgetting a child (or two) at choir pickup (and who could blame him, O'Reilly seems to ask, with so many to keep track of?). On a family vacation in a caravan large enough to seat the whole family, the door fell clean off its hinges somewhere in France. He also remembers an unlikely and enormous collection of home-recorded VHS tapes cataloged in the family's garage.

While these recollections are threaded through by "everyone else's grief, cross-bred and multiplied by the twelve of us trying to make sense of it, whether together or apart," what ultimately emerges in O'Reilly's recollections is never macabre. Instead, it is a tribute to the parents who raised him--his mother, by the legacy she left behind, and his father, in his sometimes strange and yet seemingly deliberate ways of caring for each of his children through their grief. Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? expertly combines heartfelt sentiment with a dry Irish wit that will leave readers questioning if the tears on their cheeks come from joy or sadness or dark humor--or all of the above. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Shelf Talker: This unexpectedly laugh-out-loud funny memoir tells of the author's dead mother, his 10 siblings and the single father who raised them, against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

This book will having you laughing one moment and crying the next. What a beautiful, heartfelt tribute to not only Seamas's mother, but his father who raised him after his mother's death and his ten brothers and sisters.

Very solid little memoir, and legitimately funny. I was approved for both the audiobook and ebook versions of this book, I'm so happy that I was able to switch back and forth between them. Mr. O'Reilly's narration very much elevated the already enjoyable prose. I definitely recommend either version!

This memoir was incredible - poignant and thoughtful and laugh out loud funny. I think this will resonate with anyone raised Irish Catholic, particularly those of us from large, loud families. In true Irish form, O'Reilly tells some really sad, poignant stories with a lot of dry humor, and it's such a delight to read. I had a great time, and I can't wait to share this book with my family!

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died is a charming memoir by Séamas O'Reilly that combines hilarious stories about being one of ELEVEN children raised by a single dad in Ireland, during The Troubles, with O'Reilly's self-reflective grief about losing his mom when he was too young to really remember her. The very first line (which I read to my 13 & 10 year old after they heard me cackling about it and resulted in them now referring to me as MAMMY 98% of the time) is so sad and funny and perfect: "One thing they don't tell you about mammies dying is that when they die you get new trousers."

O'Reilly walks a fine line between humor and pathos and does it wonderfully, while also paying a really lovely tribute to his dad who survived raising eleven children (with SIX of his daughters being teenagers at the same time).

"To be one of eleven was singularly, fizzily demented. At best, you were the child of sex maniacs; at worst, the creepy scions of some bearded recluse amassing weapons in the hills. It didn't help that we were so close in age and travelled, often singing, in the kind of large, vaguely municipal transport vehicle usually reserved for separatist church groups and volleyball teams made up of young offenders."

I loved this book.