I will hate myself if I let go like that and terrify this boy. I was born here, I know how this society works, I know its codes and assumptions from the inside. But I am not a poor, downtrodden Irish migrant. If you don’t give it to her right now, I’ll give ya a bleddy clout round the gob! To subject this boy to the kind of blistering display of anger I remember so vividly from my childhood.įeck off out of it ya little whelp ya, that’s my daughter’s swing. His inability to control his ferocious temper, his ignorance of what constituted acceptable social behaviour seems, right now, heroic and liberating. I imagined how my father, a very emotional and frequently hilarious man with an explosive temper, would have reacted: there’s a secret part of me that desperately wishes I could act like my father would have done in this situation. This was the one I usually read, in which another child jumps in front of my daughter in the playground to grab the swing when it was her turn. Ironically I was the only one who’d welcomed the idea, eager to learn any techniques that might improve my reading, so I was very touched when the other writers sprang to my defence and suggested she hear me reading a passage from ‘Letting Go’, the story about my daughter. In contrast she found my voice rather flat and lacking in emotion. She had nothing but praise for James Nash’s confident, southern middle-class delivery, and thought that Tom Palmer and John Siddique, from Yorkshire and Lancashire respectively, had ‘warm and natural northern accents’. Our publisher hired a voice coach to judge our reading. I was confronted with the shortcomings of my voice some years ago when I was about to embark on a book tour to promote Four Fathers, a collection of eight stories about having and being a father by four male authors. As reading your work aloud is such an important part of a writer’s job, representing a precious opportunity to promote our work, there’s a lot of pressure to do it well. E very writer I know dislikes the sound of their own voice, in fact so many people cringe when they hear themselves recorded there’s a psychological term for it: voice confrontation.

So lyrical trish cook