‘We lost more of him’ – a son recounts his father’s massive stroke

In an emotional podcast, Joe Armstrong reads the sad account of his father’s massive stroke and its impact on Joe as a young man, from his memoir In My Gut, I Don’t Believe. This podcast episode also includes Joe’s honest self-examination of his attitudes in his youth, prompted by the recent publication of the Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. Joe speaks of the need for all of us to become self-aware and to learn to think for ourselves. 

Reviewed in The Irish Times on 16 January 2020 as an honest coming-of-age memoir that will stir emotional memories for people reared in Catholic Ireland of the 1960s and 1970s, the reviewer Tim O’Brien concluded: ‘Volume 2, please’.

‘Of all of the books I have written and of all of the hundreds of articles and columns which I’ve had published, I would burn them all to save this memoir,’ says Joe Armstrong of In My Gut, I Don’t Believe: A Memoir. It’s available in paperback and as a Kindle ebook from all Amazon sites and elsewhere. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Gut-Dont-Believe-Memoir/dp/095466101X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)