i was their american dream a graphic memoir

Lehane has been wrestling with this rage, and the fallout from Boston’s racial and class conflicts, in fiction since his 1994 debut, A Drink Before the War, featuring the private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. He came from a happy home – the child of immigrants originally from Clonakilty, in Co Cork, he describes his father as a tough Irish farmer – yet the incident became “the wellspring of a lot of rage that has been swirling around in me for a very long time”. “Suddenly these people who you saw in church, some of whom you were very close to, some of whom you loved, were, if not actively throwing rocks at buses, certainly having no problem with it, because their rage, their hatred, trumped decency.” It was a paradox he has struggled to reconcile ever since.

Neighbours and friends immediately became strangers to him, he says. I’m a nine-year-old kid in a car looking up at this, and it felt.” He pauses, hovering for a moment, before landing, hard, on “medieval”. They were hanging these big, long dolls from poles, and then lighting them on fire. “Some were screaming very legitimate slogans about not having a vote, but then other people were screaming racist slogans, and were burning the main architects of busing in effigies. “We got sort of buffeted along for about 10 blocks,” Lehane says. One hot evening, driving home to their neighbourhood in nearby Dorchester, Lehane’s father took a wrong turn into the middle of a protest. Furious protesters from the largely Irish-American enclave of Southie took to the streets. After more than two years of deliberation, Judge W Arthur Garrity jnr had ordered the immediate desegregation of Boston’s public schools by busing students to different districts. Dennis Lehane’s childhood ended in the summer of 1974.

I was their american dream a graphic memoir