Nothing is ever as nice the second time
Dermot Bolger's new short story collection arrives as a quiet reckoning with the way the past refuses to stay past — how memory, unreliable and uninvited, resurfaces to reshape the present lives of ordinary Irish men and women. Across a range of characters weighted by age, grief, and regret, Bolger asks whether anyone can truly know what happened, or fully know even those they loved most. It is a collection less concerned with events than with the long shadows events cast, and the question it leaves behind — whether regret is simply the price of having lived — has no comfortable answer.
- Characters across Ireland find themselves ambushed by the past: a woman who doesn't know she left her husband, a son hunting his father's hidden cruelties, a widower who swings a golf club in grief-fuelled rage.
- The tension is not dramatic but existential — the slow, suffocating realisation that memory is not a record but a story we keep rewriting, often without knowing it.
- Bolger's spare, precise prose strips away sentiment, leaving characters — and readers — with no comfortable distance from the questions being asked about identity, loyalty, and what we owe the dead.
- Each story attempts its own navigation: a man lets his brain-injured wife believe a comforting lie; a son confronts a photographer only to find the truth more complicated than his anger; a politician mourns a kiss that never happened more than a career that did.
- The collection lands in a place of deliberate unresolution — suggesting that the weight of not knowing what really happened can be as crushing as any confirmed truth, and that regret may simply be inescapable.
Dermot Bolger's new collection moves across the whole of Ireland in search of the moments that refuse to release their hold on people. Memory is the unifying force — not the reliable, archival kind, but the kind that surfaces without warning and pulls the present under.
The opening story sets the tone with quiet devastation: a middle-aged man sits outside a former bed-and-breakfast with his wife, who remembers a passionate night they once shared there. What she doesn't remember — because a brain injury has rewritten her past — is that she left him years ago. He lets her believe they are still married, caught between relief and something far harder to name.
Other stories follow characters trying to make sense of what their parents left behind. A Galway businessman travels to Scotland to find a half-sister, only to uncover a darker story about his father's obsession. A son tracks a photographer to Portugal, armed with rage over nude images of his dead mother, only to find the truth refuses to be simple. These are not stories where the past yields clean resolution.
A widower strikes a fellow golfer with a nine-iron. A woman named Eileen carries the weight of an accident that killed a young man. A salesman named Jerome encounters his old girlfriend at a petrol station and is told, flatly, that nothing is ever as nice the second time. A former politician, his mind slowly failing, is haunted not by anything he did but by a kiss he never gave — a non-event that somehow outweighs everything.
Bolger's prose is spare and unadorned, drawing its power from precision rather than ornamentation. Period details — Harp beer, Players No. 6 cigarettes, a miraculous medal — anchor the stories in time while suggesting how memory clings to the sensory, how a brand name can drag the past into the room.
The lines that cut deepest are the bluntest. 'Money has its smell. Poverty likewise.' A character asks, 'Do we ever know our parents?' A lighthouse keeper recalls 'the casual cruelty of great beauty at play.' These are not flourishes — they are recognitions.
What the collection ultimately asks is whether memory can be trusted at all. Characters wonder if their dull, dependable spouses carried secrets to the grave. An aging politician fears his own recollections are false. Bolger offers no reassurance: the past is not fixed, it shifts with whoever is remembering it, and the weight of not knowing what really happened can be as heavy as knowing the worst.
Dermot Bolger has spent years mapping the emotional terrain of Dublin's outer reaches, but his new collection of stories pushes further—across the whole of Ireland, searching for the moments that won't let people go. The unifying current running through these tales is memory itself, that unreliable thing that can surface without warning and drag the present underwater. The older his characters grow, the heavier what they carry becomes.
In the opening story, a middle-aged couple pull their car to the side of the road outside a former bed-and-breakfast. They once made love here during a thunderstorm, and Andrew is struck that Julie remembers it at all. What he doesn't say aloud is that Julie suffered a serious brain injury in a car crash years ago, and the injury has rewritten her sense of what happened between them. She has no memory of leaving him for a younger man. She believes they are still married. Andrew, caught between relief and something more complicated, lets her believe it.
Other stories follow people trying to untangle the knots their parents left behind. A quiet businessman from Galway travels to Scotland hunting for a half-sister he's never met, only to stumble into a darker story about his late father's obsession and stalking. In another, a son tracks an elderly professor to a Portuguese island, driven by rage over nude photographs of his dead mother—but the truth, when he finds it, refuses to be simple. These are not stories where the past yields easy answers.
A widower consumed by grief strikes a fellow golfer with a nine-iron on the fourth hole. A woman named Eileen, respected at her golf club, carries the weight of a terrible accident that killed a young man and fractured her life. A salesman named Jerome stops for petrol and finds his old girlfriend Carole sitting at a table. He has always regretted their breakup, but when he asks if she wants more coffee, she tells him flatly that nothing is ever as nice the second time. A former politician, his mind slowly leaving him, is haunted by a moment fifty years past when he didn't kiss a beautiful young woman in a bedsit—a non-event that somehow matters more than everything he actually did.
Bolger's prose is spare and unadorned, which is where it finds its power. He scatters period details through the stories like artifacts: the taste of Harp beer, Players No. 6 cigarettes, a miraculous medal. These small things anchor the reader in a particular time and place, but they also suggest how memory clings to sensory detail, how a smell or a brand name can pull the past into the present.
The sentences that stick are the ones that cut deepest. "Money has its smell," Carole says. "Poverty likewise." In another story, a character wonders aloud, "Do we ever know our parents?" And in what may be the collection's best story, a former lighthouse keeper recalls "the casual cruelty of great beauty at play." These are not flowery observations. They are blunt recognitions of how the world actually works.
What haunts the collection most is the question of whether memory can be trusted at all. A woman wonders if her dull but dependable husband carried secrets to the grave, if even ordinary men must have hidden depths. An aging politician worries constantly that his own recollections are false. The stories suggest that no one can answer these questions with certainty—not about themselves, not about anyone else. The past is not a fixed thing. It shifts and changes depending on who is remembering it, and the weight of not knowing what really happened can be as heavy as knowing the truth.
Citações Notáveis
Money has its smell. Poverty likewise.— Carole, in Service Station Plaza
The casual cruelty of great beauty at play— Séamus, in A Keeper
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does Bolger keep returning to memory as the thing that breaks people? It seems almost cruel.
Because it is cruel. Memory isn't a record—it's a story we tell ourselves, and we're constantly revising it. The older you get, the more revisions pile up, and at some point you can't tell what actually happened from what you've convinced yourself happened.
But in the opening story, Julie's brain injury has actually erased her memory of leaving Andrew. That's not revision—that's deletion.
Exactly. And Andrew has to live with that. He gets to keep her, but only because she's forgotten the truth. He's trapped in a kind of mercy that feels like a lie.
The collection seems obsessed with things people didn't do—the kiss that never happened, the letter never written.
Because those are the ones that haunt us most. The things we actually did, we can at least explain to ourselves. But the things we didn't do? Those stay open. They never close.
Is there any redemption in these stories?
Not really. There's recognition, maybe. Understanding that regret is just part of being alive, that it doesn't go away. But redemption? That would require the past to change, and it never does.