Amnesiac: A Memoir (Preview)
by Neil Jordan. London: Head of Zeus, 2025. 297 pp., illus. Paperback: $18.99, E-book: $15.99.

Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

The Irish writer and filmmaker Neil Jordan has a way with the telling image, the symbol that develops from the mundane and reverberates uncannily throughout a work. His new memoir is no exception. Several times in Amnesiac, Jordan discusses a railway bridge that crosses the River Nanny near his mother’s birthplace in Mornington, Co. Meath, about thirty miles from Dublin on the east coast of Ireland. It is a bridge that has appeared in several of his films, including his acclaimed debut, the contemporaneous Angel (1982), about a showband musician-turned-vengeful assassin during the Northern Ireland Troubles, and the historical Michael Collins (1996), reconstructing the anticolonial conflict in the early twentieth century that was the root of those troubles. A still from the latter shows a walkway parallel to the bridge, on which people can walk or stop and talk while trains to and from Dublin roar overhead. Jordan filmed the opening shots of his most celebrated film The Crying Game (1992) from this walkway, depicting the fairground where the Provos abduct a Black British Army soldier.

The repetitive return in his memoir to this bridge and walkway, often using the exact same formulations, might lead the unsympathetic reader to conclude that Jordan is afflicted with senility rather than amnesia. Or, at the very least, a cheapskate publisher’s skimping on a copyeditor. Nevertheless, the bridge and walkway form an important symbol for Jordan, to be included alongside those that recur throughout his literary and cinematic work—the sea and coast, the stage, the prison cell, the forest, the circle, flight, and the ambivalent father figure.

Jordan in Amnesiac talks extensively about this structure, but only briefly and tantalizingly about what it might mean to him: “[I] returned to it anytime I needed a location or image that struck an emotional chord.” It certainly provides a useful metaphor for Jordan’s peculiar and erratic career. The walkway might be a metaphor for Jordan’s work, walking parallel to and in sight of but separate from the various main lines he encountered in that career. The first main line was that of Irish literature, which has always had more cultural capital in Ireland than the visual arts. Jordan seemed destined for an exemplary literary career—his early books won prestigious awards and local media interest; his first book was introduced by the Grand Old Man of Irish Letters, Seán Ó Faoláin; Colm Tóibín said that in 1980 Jordan was “the most promising young writer in the country” (“Issues of Truth and Invention,” London Review of Books, January 4, 2001). Yet he effectively abandoned this acclaim for the cinema, publishing only one literary work between 1983 and 2004, the period of his greatest visibility as a filmmaker. Even as a writer, Jordan sidestepped the parochial concerns of so much Irish literature by embracing American-influenced popular culture, French postmodernism, and a transgressive fantasy inspired by Symbolism, Surrealism, and Anglo-Irish Gothic.

Jordan walked parallel to the equally parochial and narrowly political concerns of contemporary Irish cinema by embracing popular genres like horror and the thriller, and by making mainstream films with stars and increasingly large budgets, first in the U.K. and later Hollywood. When he did deal with Irish history and politics, it was obliquely and ironically. Despite sharing a name with the unofficial Irish national anthem, Danny in Angel seems oblivious to the Troubles as he hunts the men responsible for killing an acquaintance of a few hours. High Spirits (1988), Michael Collins, and The Butcher Boy (1997) make intractable Ireland comprehensible by reimagining it as the setting for an Ealing comedy, a Thirties Warner Bros. pic, or a science-fiction B-movie, respectively. The Crying Game pathologizes its republican characters and, like Breakfast on Pluto (2005), finds transformative salvation in the queer margins. Those who have recently criticized the latter films and Mona Lisa for their problematic depictions of homosexuality and race should remember that homosexuality was decriminalized in Ireland only in 1993 (after The Crying Game and Mona Lisa were made), and that so much of the violence and injustice of Irish history resulted from dubious conceptions of the “native” and what Irish art dealer and gallery director Hugh Lane called the “common race instinct.”

It is not surprising to find that Amnesiac also walks in parallel to the main line of the celebrity memoir. If you want a tell-all account of Hollywood or the Irish literary scene, you won’t find it here. No hilarious escapades with Brad and Tom, no crazy benders with Bono or Roddy Doyle. Cinephiles, however, will enjoy two haunting pen portraits of the solitary geniuses Stanley Kubrick and Marlon Brando (the latter of whom Jordan meets—to discuss a possible adaptation of King Lear—soon after Brando’s son killed his sister’s boyfriend), but these are clipped and allusive literary performances in the manner of Joseph Conrad or Jordan’s sometime collaborator John Banville, not the indiscreet gossip of, say, Richard E. Grant’s diaries. The best chapters in Amnesiac, “How It Was” and “The Virus,” are long pieces about Hollywood, but they read like short stories and evoke the dreamlike nontime or suspended time of Hollywood, of being between projects, of waiting for phone calls or preparing for previews, and of traveling from motel to restaurant to cinema to motel. These depictions are especially evocative of J. G. Ballard (a major influence on Jordan’s anomalous 1983 dystopian fantasy The Dream of a Beast) and his intermediate “zones.”

Amnesiac must be the only Hollywood memoir that stints on describing celebrity parties but includes a description of its insomniac author suddenly waking up in a motel and watching the sun moving slowly up the wall. If you are the sort of reader liable to be driven up the wall by such a thing, Amnesiac may not be for you. Such extended descriptions of phenomena usually left out of narratives are a deliberate nod to Jordan’s favorite novel, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (aka In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), which on the long-running BBC radio program Desert Island Discs he chose as the book he would take as a castaway. “How It Was” alludes to both the infamous fifty-page opening of Swann’s Way (1907), wherein the narrator describes his inability to sleep as a child; and a later sequence in the same volume where he is mesmerized by the shapes thrown on his bedroom wall by a magic lantern, an optical toy that was one of the forerunners to moving pictures…

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Darragh O’Donoghue, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, is an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 4