In late May 2021, during Ireland’s third Covid lockdown, novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry delivered an unusual public lecture from his dining room in Wicklow, Ireland. The Dublin literary festival, held online, drew hundreds of attendees. Barry, often mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate, spoke about family—both his own troubled clan and the wider human fold. At 65, he had spent four decades exploring his crooked family tree, producing novels and plays inspired by his real-life ancestors. Collectively, his works form an Irish “War and Peace,” chronicling the violent 20th century through the Dunnes and the Mc Nultys.

During the lecture, titled “The Fog of Family,” Barry recounted childhood memories, including his older sister pushing him down the steps of their house in Monkstown, Dublin, and later out a window. He emphasized she was not a murderer but a child consumed by emotion. Another memory involved smearing his nappy on the wall, which his mother, Joan O’Hara, a celebrated actress, interpreted as artistic ability. Barry noted she put a pencil in his hand at two weeks old, unaware of the havoc he would wreak with it.

Barry’s career has courted outrage by humanizing villains of the Irish national story, including the Protestant minority and former British servants. His family was among the outraged. His maternal grandparents’ cursed marriage inspired his early novella, “Time Out of Mind” (1983). After reading it, his grandfather, a widowed British Army veteran, summoned him to his Dublin flat and exclaimed, “You fucker.” Barry said the conversation was the last they ever had, and his grandfather asked how he knew all these things. The answer, Barry revealed, was that his grandfather told him everything except the bad things.