Dave Duggan
RELATED LIVES – an imagined memoir by Dave Duggan is based on a set of family anecdotes. It combines family and personal history, with imagination openly brought to the assistance of memory. The concept behind this literary work is that while memory tentatively secures the past, imagination delicately opens the future. Combining both may bring them into the present for the reader, in a form of imagined memoir. There are first and third-person stories; a monologue story; a set of dialogues; poetry; personal history narratives; literary and philosophical short essays. The forms vary and the characters, locations and stories change. Holding the work together is the binding of memory and imagination by the writer’s humane voice.
Dave Duggan began writing short fictions, based on anecdotes and images from the lives of members of his family, just over four years ago. Gaps, possibilities and speculations in those anecdotes, and his own yearning to have more of them, impelled him to write stories, grounded in memory and family lore. RELATED LIVES – an imagined memoir by Dave Duggan – leaves the reader replete with a strengthened sense of self, made manifest in the lives of the people in the book people who cannot be googled.
