This is the text of a keynote lecture that Sinéad Morrissey delivered at the Ciaran Carson Conference, held at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast on 14 September 2023

Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory, first published in 1997, a year before The Good Friday Agreement, offers, in his own phrase, an ‘alternative hologram’ of Belfast, pieced together by memory. All memoir is pieced together by memory. The term memoir describes its provenance as a genre. The Star Factory is striking, however, in drawing our attention to the maverick ways in which memory actually works, to Ciaran’s laterally associative leaps and flights of cognitive fancy (I will return to flying soon), and to his submission to serendipity as the book’s organising principle. ‘Everything you open seethes with memory’, he writes, describing, with his hallmark lavish attention, the contents of his writing desk drawer, which he has, just now, opened, prompted to do so, of course, by thinking about something else:

Let us concentrate, instead, on the contents of a drawer filled with bits of string, a bunched red fist of rubber gloves, empty cotton reels, an elastic-bound, dog-eared deck of cards, a two-point electric plug, a measuring tape, two brass door-knobs, three mouth organs, and a solitary knitting-needle – these are but some of the objects I retrieved just now, perusing one adjacent drawer of the table under the machine on which I’m typing. How many hands of cards were dealt? How many conformations? How many skirts were hemmed, how many buttonholes? What wild tunes were played? How many dirges? What squeaking ...