Rosemary Mahoney was educated at Harvard College and Johns Hopkins University and has been awarded numerous awards for her writing, including a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a nomination for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, a Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, and Harvard's Charles E. Horman Prize for writing. Mahoney is the author of Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff (2007), a New York Times Notable Book, A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman (1998), The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground (2004), Whoredom in Kimmage: The World of Irish Women (1993), a National Book Critics Award Finalist and New York Times Notable Book, and The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China (2003), a New York Times Notable Book. She has also written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Observer, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, National Geographic Traveler, O: The Oprah Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine. She is a citizen of Ireland and the United States and lives in Rhode island.
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Whoredom in KimmageThe World of Irish Women
I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…
Whoredom in Kimmage:The World of Irish Women -
Whoredom in KimmageThe World of Irish Women
Religion was as pervasive as the currency. It was everywhere. It was embedded deep in the Irish mind, and that seemed most evident in the way Irish people blessed themselves as they passed by a church; an instinctual flutter of the right hand as they studied the headlines of the newspaper they had just bought, or scolded a disobedient child, or made a conversational point to a companion. Sometimes just the fingers moved, twitching above the sternum or passing absently over the face in a barely perceptible wiping motion. Riding in a Dublin bus, I was often gripped by an eerie disorientation at the moment the bus passed by a church (a church I was never quick enough to notice), and I glimpsed, in the periphery of my vision, thirty hands flying into the air in similar fashion.
Whoredom in Kimmage:The World of Irish Women -
Whoredom in KimmageThe World of Irish Women
Conor was hot-faced and frowning now. Angrily he said, “Well, you son of a bitch, Mick Pat! When was the last time you had a good cleaning out? When was the last time you had a good cleaning out of your pipes, Mick Pat? You never had sex in your life, you little bastard. You’re a virgin. You are a virgin.”
Mick Pat sat still in his seat. He looked at the floor, and his heavy gray hair fell forward boyishly on his high forehead. With his smaller hand he brushed his hair back, then laid the hand gently over his mouth; but for the nicotine stains, it was the hand of an adolescent boy. “I am not,” he said. “I am not. I am not.” But he spoke unconvincingly, as though trying to persuade his own doubtful soul.
Whoredom in Kimmage:The World of Irish Women
"A multilayered, utterly gripping account of life among the developing world’s large blind population . . . Everyone knows that the loss of one sense strengthens the others, but to understand exactly what that means is not easy. Ms. Mahoney writes with an alchemy that actually inches the reader along to the point of comprehension." —The New York Times [on For the Benefit of Those Who See]
"Rosemary Mahoney, the exquisitely precise author who in past books has brought alive the insular culture of Irish women and a solo river trip down the Egyptian Nile, overlooks nothing . . . a vivid portrait of people and places . . . it's as if she'd turned on the lights in a dark room, revealing how the world appears to those who experience it with their other four senses. The seeing reader will gasp in recognition and understanding, marveling at lives once hidden." —Entertainment Weekly [on For the Benefit of Those Who See]
“What marks Ms. Mahoney’s writing as special is her ability to see, feel and describe in simple but evocative prose . . . her choice of language is so right and so graphic that one almost has the sensation of watching a film.” —Orville Schell, The New York Times Book Review [on The Early Arrival of Dreams]
“A quirky, observant chronicle . . . Mahoney has an infallible ear for the spoken word and eye for telling detail. Whoredom’s vignettes are encased in prose so pellucid and evocative that readers may want to stop and reread passages just to savor their rhythms and imagery.” —John Elson, Time [on Whoredom in Kimmage]
Selected Works
